[RESOLVED] how to replace any number of ---- with just one -

VisionsOfCody

I'm trying to write some code to sort of normalise filenames - to remove any strange characters, replaced accented characters with the non-accented equivalent, replace spaces with a dash etc

so far it's ok :

$string = "l'éléction .à nîmes c'est maïs **en españa. la ²&<'(-_)=$^*!:;,~#{[|`\^@]}¤?§%µ£¨+°>$££££ d'être là.jpg";

$bits = split('\.',$string);

$numBits = count($bits);

$str = "";

for($i=0;$i<($numBits-1);$i++){
	$str .= $bits[$i];
}

$str = strtolower($str); 

$rep_fr = array("à","â","ä","é","è","ë","ê","ï","î","ô","ö","ù","û","ç","ñ","l'","d'","s'","m'","t'","n'","c'"," ","--");
$rep_to = array("a","a","a","e","e","e","e","i","i","o","o","u","u","c","n", "" , "" , "" , "" , "" , "" , "" , "-","-");

for($i=0;$i<count($rep_fr);$i++){
	$str = str_replace($rep_fr[$i],$rep_to[$i],$str);
}

$str = ereg_replace("[^A-Za-z0-9/-]", "", $str);

$last = ($numBits-1);
$ext = $bits[$last];

echo "<br>".$str.".".$ext;

but the string in the above example outputs like this :

election-a-nimes-est-mais-en-espana-la---etre-la.jpg

so what i need now is a way of replacing any multiple dashes with a single dash - how could i do that ?

or is there maybe a simpler way to go about this using less code ?

thanks

Installer

while (strpos($str, '--') !== false) {
    $str = str_replace('--', '-', $str);
}

suntra

Ceci fonctionne également et remplacera un nombre infini de traits d'union :

$str='election-a-nimes-est-mais-en-espana-la---etre-la.jpg';
echo preg_replace('/\-{2,}/', '-', $str);

(translation : this also works et replaces an infinite number of dashes... of course "infinite" being relative...)

VisionsOfCody

thank you to Installer

et merci à Suntra

🙂

VisionsOfCody

If i might just take a little more of your time with this one - my replacing strategy seems to work with just about everything except if there's a quote in the file name - how could i get rid of that ? (the problem being that the string is in quotes and it just throws up a parse error if there's a quote in the string itself)

thanks

Weedpacket

Three things:

Have a look at [man]strtr[/man]. That could shorten some of your code somewhat.
[man]str_replace[/man] can take arrays as well as strings.
PHP has a mechanism for dealing with quotes inside a quoted [man]string[/man].

VisionsOfCody

excellently useful information there !

thanks weedpacket