trim text after open parentheseis

[bad_gui]

I'm modifying someone else's code.

 

One problem is that when the app queries a public database some non-standard entries cause problems.

 

For example the journal name:

 

      Science (New York, N.Y.)

 

should be just

 

      Science

 

Here is the code that strips HTML but how do I strip text after the open parenthesis?

        if (strstr($result_array[$i], "<Title>")) {
        $journal = utf8_decode(trim(strip_tags($result_array[$i])));
        }

 

Does this require regexp?

[doni49]

have a look at regular expressions.

 

http://us.php.net/preg_matchall

[bad_gui]

I couldn't figure out how to use regexp to delete text after and including certain characters.

 

For example, I want to convert the following text

Clinical cancer research : an official journal of the American Association for Cancer Research

to simply this for uploading into my database

Clinical cancer research

 

The problem is that there are many journal titles with extra text after the relevant title and I don't want to

write rules to substitute specific strings for each and every case.

 

Here is a sed script that trims the text from the colon to the end.  I can add a version of the sed command also

for open parenthesis and dash etc.

 

sed -i -e 's/:.*/ /' bogus.txt

 

How would I apply this when the input text is coming from $_POST?

 

$title = str_replace("\r\n", " ", $_POST["title"]);

[uniflare]

u would use preg_match , eg:

 

preg_match("/\A[a-z0-9A-Z _]+/i",$title,$matches);

$title = $matches[0];

 

hope this helps, if $matches[0] is not correct try using print_r to find the correct key, it should not change.

[doni49]

Maybe if you give us a bigger sample of your data, we might be better able to help.  But right now, it looks like you want to grab everything before a colon and disregard from the colon on.

 

In your first post above, it looked like you had "Science (New York, N.Y.)" and you wanted Science--in fact, that's what you said.

 

Then you're talking about an sed script--WHAT is an sed script?

[bad_gui]

my apologies.  I am looking for a general tool that will remove the extra text after special

characters such as : and ( in any string.

 

Sed is an old-school unix/linux tool  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sed

 

Thanks uniflare! Your script works.  I looked at the man pages for preg_match but

didn't see how it would work for this purpose.

[doni49]

Thanks uniflare! Your script works.  I looked at the man pages for preg_match but

didn't see how it would work for this purpose.

Uh--talk about contradictions. 

 

Don't see a use for preg_match, but the example provided (using preg_match) works.  I dun't get that one.  ???

 

Glad to see you got what you needed though.

[bad_gui]

Yes.  When I looked at the man page I saw that it would remove (for example) the last 7 characters

after the @ symbol.

 

What I couldn't see is how it would replace all of the text after special characters regardless of

how long the string is (for example 7, 9 23 characters long).

 

Thanks to all you php pros for awesome fixes.

[uniflare]

no problem, regular expressions is a very deadly tool when used correctly