Can't figure why this doesn't work

[steve m]

Hello,

 

I am kind of new to regular expressions and I've been trying to get this script to work, but it won't.  I can't figure out why it doesn't work.  This is just a test script, but I want the preg-match() to find "\n".  The \n is posted through a form, and it seem like the preg_match() function is not reading the \ before the n, because it always comes up false.  Am I doing something wrong here?  I've tried several different ways to the pattern and nothing is working for me.

 

<?php
$strip_text = stripslashes($_POST["preg_text"]);

if(preg_match("/(n)/i", $strip_text))
{
	echo "It matched";
}

else
{
	echo "Did not Match";
}	
?>

[sasa]

try

if(preg_match("/\\n/i", $strip_text))

[steve m]

Thanks for replying back.  I tried it and that didn't work either.  For some reason that backslash is not being recognized literal character.  Am I not escaping the backslash right?

[lemmin]

Are you trying to match a literal "\n" or an actual new line character? If you are trying to match a literal, you need to escape the backslash from PHP AND from regex. This means you need FOUR backslashes total. "\\\\n" will match a litteral "\n".

[steve m]

Oh sorry, I'm trying to match or replace a new line character.  Would the code below work for trying to match or replace a new line character?

<?php

preg_match("/\n/i", $strip_text);
?>

[trq]

Do you want to match or replace? There really is no need for preg_match at all unless your trying to find a pattern. If your looking for a literal string just use either strpos or str_replace depending on what exactly it is your trying to do.

[steve m]

Sorry if I'm confusing you.  What I want to do is get rid of newline characters from input fields from forms.  I was told to use preg_replace() to achieve that.  So if I echoed the varible it still would have the "\n".

[chigley]

<?php

$input = "Hello
my
name
is
Charlie";

$input = str_replace("\n", "", $input);

echo $input; // HellomynameisCharlie

?>

 

^^ You mean like that? Much simpler

[lemmin]

Assuming you are trying to find every line, You will want to use preg_match_all:

preg_match_all("[(.*)\\n]", $strip_text, $matches);

 

That will return all the lines that have a return at the end into $matches, so maybe not the last one.