str_replace

[php-n00b]

What's Up?

 

OK, So since the need for php has been cropping up in my latest project a lot lately, I decided to get down and get learning! Somehow, I even amazed myself, I got this far.

 

Basically when you use a basic IP php logger, It logs your IP and date to separate lines, So if your getting lots of visits then your gonna have a bulky list, Lets see if we can change that?

<?php
$ip = $_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR'];
$datum = date("d-m-y / h:a");
$invoegen = "$datum - $ip \n";
$fopen = fopen("Database.html", "a");
$echo = file_get_contents('Database.html');
$old = "$ip";
$new = "\n";
$make = str_replace($old, $new, $echo);
fwrite($fopen, $make);
fwrite($fopen, $invoegen);
fclose($fopen);
# ip logging completed!
?>

As you can see it gets your IP, And then attempts to replace it in the log, And it works 100% fine, But now its time for the harder part, The date, How could we remove the date that the IP came with, str_replace doesn't use wildcards does it? (*)?

 

Thanks Bye.

[nafetski]

Nope, str_replace doesn't handle an * type character...

 

...however Regular Expressions do!

 

What do you want to replace exactly?

 

If your dates are formatted like... 12-12-2009 (or) 12/12/2009...

 

A regex like this would match. 

\d{2}(\-|\/)\d{2}(\-|\/)\d{4}

 

To break it down...

 

\d means any digit.

{2} means 2 of them

(\-|\/) looks confusing, but broken down it's not too bad.  The backslashes just escape the special chracters, in this area we are looking for a hyphen OR a backslash.

 

Then pretty much repeating that across.

 

So an example of how to replace it would be (untested, but should work)

<?php 

$pattern = "/\d{2}(\-|\/)\d{2}(\-|\/)\d{4}/"
$string = "This is a string that has a bunch of stuff and a date 12-01-2009 in it";
$newstring = preg_replace($pattern,"MONKEYS KNOW KUNG FU",$string);

echo $newstring;

?>

 

This should echo out..

This is a string that has a bunch of stuff and a date MONKEYS KNOW KUNG FU it

 

Regex is intimidating at first, but once you get the hang of it - makes string manipulation way easy   Good luck, and let me know if you need any more help.