[SOLVED] Removing all but Spaces and Apostrophes

[conker87]

I'm looking to remove all punctuation and such from a string (not including spaces and apostrophes) THEN I'd like to replace the remaining spaces and apostrophes with dashes (-). I have absolutely no clue about regex, but I'm assuming the use of preg_replace() is needed.

 

Can anyone enlighten me?

[nrg_alpha]

Well, many ways to do that. Assuming that consecutive spaces or a mix of consecutive space then apostrophes are replaced with a single dash:

 

$str = 'Here text has punctuation! But, I have a "question".  Have you heard of Vézère River at Thonac? It\'s a beautiful place!';
$str = preg_replace('#[.?!,"]#', '', $str);
$str = preg_replace('#[ \']+#', '-', $str);
echo $str;

 

You could also use a mix of regex / string translate:

 

$str = 'Here text has punctuation! But, I have a "question".  Have you heard of Vézère River at Thonac? It\'s a beautiful place!';
$str = strtr($str, array('.'=>'','?'=>'',','=>'','!'=>'','"'=>'')); // using string translate
$str = preg_replace('#[ \']+#', '-', $str);
echo $str;

[conker87]

That's brilliant. Are either ways more efficient that one another?

[nrg_alpha]

I would think the one using strtr would probably be faster, as string functionality outstrips regex in raw speed (but in truth, the amount of text would have to be quite huge to start seeing the speed differences between the two methods.. so for modest text, it probably doesn't really matter much I'd guess).

[conker87]

They're just stripping out titles, which are never more than 100 characters long anyway. Thanks for the help, saved me a load of time.

[nrg_alpha]

Yeah, for strings that short, either solution (along with go knows how many more are out there) will do.

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