str_replace() seemingly has no effect

TheSoko

I'm writing a link database, and for the search engine I'm using
I'm building a keyword list. To get keyword I use fopen to actually visit the link, suck out all the html tags and non-alphanumeric stuff, and then I have a list of common words that I would like to delete from the keyword list as well.

Unfortunately, it seems that my call to str_replace has no effecte. Here's all of(I'm hoping) the relevant code...

  // Remove meaningless keywords here

  $file = fopen("include/badwords.txt", "r");
  $commonwords = array();
  while(!feof($file))
    {
      $word = strtoupper(fgets($file));
      array_push($commonwords, $word);
    }

  $text = strtoupper($text);
  $text = str_replace($commonwords, "", $text);

Badwords.txt is just a list of common words, all in caps, one each line. $text is the keyword list. By the time this code executes it's just a string of words separated by spaces.

Help would most certainly be appreciated.

bubblenut

In the badwords.txt file each word is on a new line right? So character by character each line has a word and then a newline character. I believe it is this newline character which is screwing things up because you are not stripping it off so when you do the str_replace it's looking for occurences of each word followed by a newline character. Try the following code.

     $file = fopen("include/badwords.txt", "r");
      $commonwords = array();
      while(!feof($file))
        {
          $word = str_replace("\n", "", strtoupper(fgets($file)));
          array_push($commonwords, $word);
        }

  $text = strtoupper($text);
  $text = str_replace($commonwords, "", $text);

HTH
Bubble

TheSoko

That did it! Thank you so much!

Actually, I had to change that a little bit since it was matching the A's in the middle of words, so the final code actually turned out to be...

  // Remove meaningless keywords here

  $file = fopen("include/badwords.txt", "r");
  $commonwords = array();
  $replace = array();
  while(!feof($file))
    {
      $word = " ";
      $word .= str_replace(array("\r", "\n"), "", strtoupper(fgets($file)));
      $word .= " ";
      array_push($commonwords, $word);
    }

  $text .= " "; // So that we can match the last word
  $text = strtoupper($text);
  $text = str_replace($commonwords, " ", $text);

And I made sure to put a space before the first word and after the last. When I build my query statement later it takes out the multiple spaces, so it should work fantastically now.