A complete REGEX newbie... How to?

Z3RatuL

I have to get a book for regex, but until then I should get some help to solve one of my problems...

I have a website and started optimizing it for search engines using apache's mod_rewrite. Everything went as planned except the fact that when I have a title of a product called: Pizza - 3 Slices, I want to remove both space and hyphen so the url will look like: Pizza3Slices.

I tried preg_replace but being a complete regex newbie only thing I could accomplish is to remove either the space or the hyphen.

preg_replace("/ /", "", $row['b_name'])

preg_replace("/-/", "", $row['b_name'])

Any help?

laserlight

An example:

preg_replace('/[ -]/', '', $row['b_name'])

Check out the PHP manual's entry on regex syntax.

Also, it is better to specify what you want, then strip out everything else, than to specify what you do not want, and only strip those out.

Lillefix

<?
$string = "Pizza - 3 Slices";
$remove = array(' ','-');
$string_new = str_replace($remove, "", $string);
echo $string_new;
//Will output "Pizza3Slices"
?>

laserlight

Lillefix's suggestion is good if indeed you only want to strip based on what you do not want, but it cannot be easily adapted to strip based on what you want.

I suggest that you avoid the use of the short open tag as it is not guaranteed to be available. In other words, use <?php instead of <?.