[RESOLVED] PCRE (again)

[SpeedBird]

Here's what I'm trying:

I have a literal string like this: 'This is David's note'

I want to escape the single-quote between the d and s in David's but leave the leading and trailing single-quotes intact (another one of those things I thought would be easy). Here's what I've tried:

<?php

$note = "'This is David's note'";
$pattern = '/(?<=\w)\'(?=\w)/';
$replacement = "\'";

preg_replace($pattern,$replacement,$note);

echo $note; // Outputs 'This is David's note'
?>

Can the \w character class not be used with look ahead/behind assertions or am I approaching this completely the wrong way?

[suntra]

Are the quotes always the first and last characters, I would simply use "normal" string functions...

$strNote = "'This is David's note'";
$strNote = substr($strNote, 0, 1) . addslashes(substr($strNote, 1, -1)) . substr($strNote, -1);

[SpeedBird]

suntra wrote:

Are the quotes always the first and last characters

Unfortunately, no. I need to remove single quotes if they are preceded and followed by a word character (a-z 0-9 _).

[laserlight]

I think you need to make a simple change to your code:

$note = preg_replace($pattern,$replacement,$note);

The problem was that you were replacing, but not assigning the replaced string.

[SpeedBird]

Thanks laserlight, that did it.

[laserlight]

You're welcome 🙂
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