text replace

[bigpelican]

Hi,

Can anyone advise me how can i do the following

• read a block of text and replace any characters that is not (A-Z, a-z, 0-9, space) to another character such as *

Eg.

"This is a block of+ text to be> replace. Some<#> weird @characters% i want to remove"

to

"This is a block of text to be replace Some** weird characters i want to remove"

I've look into preg_replace, it can only replace a certain pattern.
i am not sure how to replace characters that is not in the pattern.
Such as [A-Za-z0-9] is valid, anything other then that replace to *

Please advise.

[esukf]

<?php
function normalizeString($string)
{
	//replace any characters that is not (A-Z, a-z, 0-9, space) and replace with *
	$string = preg_replace('/[^a-zA-Z0-9\s]/', '*', $string);

return $string;
}
?>

[bigpelican]

thanks alot!

i will try the code segment.

i am still a noob in regex, didnt know ^ to not the pattern.