regular expression and preg_replace

[jansky]

hi to all regex expert

im reading regular expression but for me is a little bit tricky yet

and cant create a good output

here is a simple
<font face='airal'>hello world </font>

now it will remove <font face='arial'> and </font>
the only thing remain is hello world

its a little bit spoon feeding for me but it will help me understand more on the regular expresion

thanks for understanding

thanks

[NogDog]

$str = preg_replace('#<font[^>]>(.*)</font>#iUs', "\\1", $str);

[nrg_alpha]

In going the regex route, and assuming you want the font content from any font tag:

$str = preg_replace('#<font[^>]*>(.*?)</font>#is', "\\1", $str);

If you want specific fonts tags (like the attribute face='arial'), simply substitue the negated character class [^>]* with the attribute / value...

$str = preg_replace('#<font face=\'arial\'>(.*?)</font>#is', "\\1", $str);

[jansky]

thanks for explaining using regex now i will play more around on it to understand more

[nrg_alpha]

You can read more about regex by checking out this site as well as this one, and you can also pick up this book. I would suggest getting your feet wet with the site links first. Then go for the book if you want to really get a better handle on how regex works.

[jansky]

between what does #is stand for?

[nrg_alpha]

In preg statements, the patterns are encapsulated by delimiters. In Perl Compatible Regular Expressions, delimiters can be any non-whitespace, non alpha-numeric ASCII character other than the backslash.

The letters that immediately follow the closing delimiter (in this case as you see, both Nog and I chose # characters for delimiters), are called modifiers, which perform extra tasks to the pattern at hand.

As well as the links I provided above, you can read more about PCRE here. Regex isn't necessarily hard per-say, but rather tricky and intimidating at first.. but in time, as you keep playing around with it, you'll see it isn't so bad once you get to know it more.