preg_replace question

[vexx]

I have the following preg_replace:

$title = preg_replace('/[^\w\' -]/', '', trim($title));
$title = preg_replace('/ +/', ' ', $title);

It subsitutes all the nasty chars in the title with space, exception being the ' and - chars. I want to add the / and \ chars also to the exception list, how it's best to do it?

I have an ideea..but i wanna be sure, you guys are way better than me 🙂

[sfullman]

your coding is good, just add /\ inside the [] brackets, but you'll need to deal with the issue of escaping since you use // as your delimiters. I believe you could use a # or ~ as your delimiters instead to make it easier.

vexx;10881442 wrote:

I have the following preg_replace:

$title = preg_replace('/[^\w\' -/\]/', '', trim($title));
$title = preg_replace('/ +/', ' ', $title);

It subsitutes all the nasty chars in the title with space, exception being the ' and - chars. I want to add the / and \ chars also to the exception list, how it's best to do it?

I have an ideea..but i wanna be sure, you guys are way better than me 🙂

[vexx]

Yes, I can't add / \ inside the brakets, the preg_replace gives me an error. Can you give me a more concrete example how can i escape them or how to make this work?

[sfullman]

ugh.. well, this does seem to work, try it:

$title = 'Here we go - and the next clause \/ - and more';
$title = preg_replace('#[^\\\/\w\' -]#', '', trim($title));
$title = preg_replace('/ +/', ' ', $title); 
echo "|$title|";

sometimes I hack at the escaping 🙂

[vexx]

sfullman;10881472 wrote:

sometimes I hack at the escaping 🙂

what do you mean by that?

ill try this in the morning and ill get back to you here

[nrg_alpha]

Vexx, generally, I personally advise against using the '/' character as a delimiter. More uncommon characters that are not going to be used is preferred.. as sfullman stated.. using # or ~ ... The most common I see among the safer characters that usually don't need to be escaped are '#' and '%'.. in either case, avoiding the '/' as a delimiter simply means that if you need to match such a character, you don't need to escape that character first.. just makes things a little easier.

Cheers,

NRG