Help with preg_replace or ereg_replace multiple replaces once

[phpdevil]

Hi,

I want to make a replacement of special characters through a string such as:

$str = "This is a small string : With Features & Stuff";

this should be replaced with :

This-is-a-small-string-With-Features-Stuff

I am aware we can do this by using preg_replace or ereg_replace, but the following code is not giving exact returns.

preg_replace("/[^a-zA-Z0-9\s]/", "\-", $str);

This returns:

This-is-a-small-string---With-Features---Stuff

I certainly don't want those extra ----s. What can I do?

[johanafm]

That is either not the pattern you're using or that is not the result it returns.

Your patterns replaces any one character that is NOT between a to z inclusive, A to Z inclusive, 0-9 inclusive or any kind of white space. As such, there are two characters to replace, ':' and '&'.
You also replace these characters, not with a dash -, but with two characters, backslash followed by dash '-'.

Drop the ws chars from the negated class, allow multiple characters and drop the \ from the replacement string.