Regular Expressions

jwb666

I am stuck on something for an application I am using - what it does is writes user inputted text to file, then displays it. Before it writes, the inputted text goes through a lot of things to tidy it up, and also adds <hr>last edited by <b>$member</b> on $date to the end of the file. $member conatins a session variable (which contains the member's name of who is logged in and editing the text) and date is the following : date('jS F Y - H:i') - maybe not relevent but just giving as much inf as possible.

The problem is displaying the file contents in a textarea - and deleting the <hr>last edited by... section, or when the user edits it more than once they are going to have multiple of these. I turned to eregi_replace, but ran into difficulty. I tried both:

eregi_replace('<hr>last edited by <b>.*</b>.*$', '', $data);

eregi_replace('<hr>last[[:blank:]]edited[[:blank:]]by[[:blank:]]<b>.*</b>.*$', '', $data);

the second, by my logic (the first i forgot the POSIX space/tab class) this would have deleted this for use in a textarea. the date varies loads, so i used . ( . for any character, for repeat 0 or more) on the date and also member name. I added $ so it would only get the one added at the end of the string, no others.

but my logic was wrong (as it normally is!) so... i'm cluless. i have used the manual for reference about Regular Expressions, but no hope.

any help would be apprieciated - as it always is!

cheers,

jwb666

silent

$output = eregi_replace('<hr>last edited by <b>[[:alnum:][:space:]]*<\/b>','',$data);

I tested this, and it works fine

jwb666

cheers, i'll try that - thanks a lot!

silent

You are very welcome. I still stuggle with regular expressions sometimes, but the best way to get good at them is to look at lots of examples, and by trial and (lots of) error.

If that doesn't work for you, we'll try something else.
(If it does work, please mark this thread resolved!)

Good luck!

jwb666

unfortunately no luck, i think maybe the [[:alnum:]] bit - the member name conatins letters then the date numbers, so i'll try the letters one for member name see if it works.

cheers again,

jwb666

silent

[:alnum:] means alphanumeric.
Meaning letters OR numbers.
Can you post one of the ones that doesn't work here?
Then I can really work on it for you.

jwb666

k, thanks - i'll post some of the ones that didnt work as soon as i get home 😉

silent

Maybe there's things other than letters or numbers? Like - or .?

$output = eregi_replace('<hr>last edited by <b>[[:alnum:][:space:][:punct:]\-\/]*</b>','',$data);

jwb666

no it only uses numbers and letters - like jwb666

bubblenut

Are you sure there isn't a trailing newline character? I'm not too hot on POSIX but I know in PCRE dot does not match newlines unless you specifically tell it to.
Try this :

preg_replace('/<hr>last edited by <b>.*</b>.*$/iUS','',$data);

the pattern modifiers (i, U & S) are as follows.
i - Case insensitive
U - Un-greedy (important to stop the .*s matching everything back to the first occurence of "<hr>last edited... ")
S - Dotall, makes the dot match all characters, including newlines

HTH
Bubble

jwb666

ok sorry everyone, my net broke, but i feel i have kind-of wasted some of ur time 🙁

cos to make it simple i sed i had tried this:

eregi_replace('<hr>last edited by <b>.*</b>.*$', '', $data);

but in actually fact i was using BB_Code, not <b> tags, , so i had actually tried this:

eregi_replace('<hr>last edited by [b].*[/b].*$', '', $data);

which anyone would have told me, put a backslash before the square barckets, so [b] etc.

i have tried this and it works... sorry i was just trying to make it simple while going for <b>
:o

however regular expressions confuse me still, so im going to re-ignite this post again...

1st prob:

i have tried to make something like :: Eg-Cool ::~ strip non letters/numbers.

here it what i tried but i no it is completely wrong:

$member_acro = eregi_replace('[^[[:aphnum:]]]', '', $member_name);

i'll ask the 2nd prob later, cheers for ur time!