String replacement for :text:

stwum

I have a string like so:

This a [COLOR=red]:bye:[/COLOR] test but [COLOR=red]:go:[/COLOR] it's not working[COLOR=red]:sorry:[/COLOR].

I want to strip out any occurence of :text: after the first one. In the above example, the result would be:

This a [COLOR=red]:bye:[/COLOR] test but it's not working.

I'm trying to use preg_replace to do this. Unfortunately, I'm stumped.

Roger_Ramjet

Do not follow you What is :text: supposed to mean? It does not match :bye: :go: or :sorry: . Neither do they match each other.

mtmosier

Don't know of a way to do it in one go. Easier to loop through. For that matter, you might consider just exploding it and recombining.

$string = "This a :bye: test but :go: it's not working:sorry:.";

$tstring = '';
while ($tstring != $string) {
    $tstring = $string;
    $string = preg_replace('/^([^:]*:.*?:[^:]*):.*?: ?(.*)$/', '\1\2', $string);
}

echo $string;
echo "\n";

stwum

Originally posted by Roger Ramjet
Do not follow you What is :text: supposed to mean? It does not match :bye: :go: or :sorry: . Neither do they match each other.

In :text:, text can be any word consisting of text characters.

stwum

mtmosier,

Thank for the help. Unfortunately, your code simply shows this output :
12

Roger_Ramjet

Use substr_count() to count how many occurances there are.
If greater than one then carrry on.
Use strpos() to find position of first occurance
Use strlen() to get length of word
Add length to starting position and use that as offset in str_replace() to replace all other occurences with empty string.

I'm sure someone here has a smarter way to this with regular expressions or something, but this one works for me.

mtmosier

Argh. Anyone else think backslashes shouldn't be stripped from code snippets by the forum?

Should have been this:

$string = preg_replace('/^([^:]*:.*?:[^:]*):.*?: ?(.*)$/', "\\\\1\\\\2", $string);