search and replace

[siobhan]

I have a string

Nokia 3100 (49532 bytes)Nokia 3100b (3723 bytes)Nokia 3108 (12004 bytes)

I would like to replace the bits in between the phone model number e.g. " (XXXXX bytes)" with a comma, to produce:

Nokia 3100,Nokia 3100b,Nokia 3108,

What is the best way to do this? I have been reading the manual on patterns but it is very confusing.

Thanks
Siobhan

[Weedpacket]

Your pattern is:

/ \(.+?\)/

( (escaped with a [/b] because ( usually has a special meaning in regexp patterns);
.+: Followed by one or more characters (any characters will do)
?: but not too many (you don't want it getting carried away just because ) is a character too)
)Up to here.
Stick that into [man]preg_replace[/man]; the replacement text is just a comma.

[siobhan]

Works perfectly!!! One quick amendment: How do I get a comma from appearing at the end?

<?php
$string = "Nokia 3100 (49532 bytes)Nokia 3100b (3723 bytes)Nokia 3108 (12004 bytes) ";
$pattern = "/ (.+?)/";
$replacement = ",";
echo preg_replace($pattern, $replacement, $string);
?>

This produces:

Nokia 3100,Nokia 3100b,Nokia 3108,

I just want to get rid of the final comma at the end of the list--is that possible?

Thanks ever so much,
Siobhan

[Weedpacket]

[man]rtrim[/man] would be sufficient; don't forget to trim spaces as well as commas (it looks like there might be a space after your last (...)).