Stripping Non-alphabetics

[Anon]

Is there a way to remove specific characters from a string? Specifically, I want to strip the string from all spaces, commas, hyphens and periods.

[terje-s]

This can be solved in several ways. One method would be regular expressions, and another one would be to write a function for this;

function stripstring($string) {
$stripThis = " ,.125()!#¤";
$ret = $string;
for ($z = 0; $z < strlen($stripThis); $z++) {
$ret = str_replace(substr($stripThis, $z, 1), "", $ret);
}
return $ret;
}

This would (hopefully) replace every char in $stripThis with blank.

[keegan]

A regular expression would be much more appropriate and efficient. I'm no regexp guru but here's how I'd do it:

<?php

// this removes all characters except letters, numbers, and underscores
function remove_chars($str) {
$pattern = '/\W/';
return preg_replace($pattern, '', $str);
}

?>

-Keegan