word seperation

[Anon]

I'm developing an application in which a string is given as input, which is then split into an array of it's individual words via explode(" ",$in);. Each element of array $in then gets checked against a database. This all works fine, until you throw punctuation in. For example, if $in = "Foo bar." $in[0] = "Foo" and $in[1] = "bar.". when you check "bar." against a databse with an entry for bar, it will not recognize it with the added punctuation. I'm fairly certain a regular expression is in order, but I have not been able to figure out how to make it remove the punctuation for the sake of the database look up, but then add it back in the same relative place once the rest of that element has been modified by the database. Any help would be appreciated.

-Jason [maestro.at.cynica.org]

[[deleted]]

You can either remove everything you don't want, or keep only those things you want to keep;

$sString="hello, this is a string.";
// Remove what you don't want
echo preg_replace("/[.,]/", ' ', $sString);

// or keep what you do want
echo preg_replace("/[^a-zA-Z]/", ' ', $sString);
exit;

"but then add it back in the same relative"

You would ofcourse make a copy of the origal string, remove the punctuation, check it, and then continue processing with another copy of the original string.