Regular Expression Q.

I'm a n00b when it comes to regular expressions. I can do the basics, but need some help with this one.

Say I have a paragraph with the following sentence:

You need to replace the carburetor, transmission, spark plugs, both driver and passenger mirrors, and tailights. This should come out to around $800.

Code (markup):

I want to be able to pull out all the comma separated words/phrases and then re-order them and put them back into the paragraph..

So I would end up with something like:

You need to replace the both driver and passenger mirrors, transmission, spark plugs, and tailights, carburetor. This should come out to around $800.

Code (markup):

Any ideas?

 

You don't need a regex for that. use str_replace where you can since it's faster. Edit the $symbols array to control what exactly you want out of your string.

$string = 'You need to replace the carburetor, transmission, spark plugs, both driver and passenger mirrors, and tailights. This should come out to around $800.';
	
	function removeSymbols( $string ) 
	{	
		$symbols = array('/','\\','\'','"',',','.','<','>','?',';',':','[',']','{','}','|','=','+','-','_',')','(','*','&','^','%','$','#','@','!','~','`');
		for ($i = 0; $i < sizeof($symbols); $i++)
		{
			$string = str_replace($symbols[$i],'',$string);
		}			
		return trim($string);
	}

	$string = removeSymbols( $string );

	echo $string;

PHP:

 

That is the thing,

I'm not trying to replace certain words, but rather I want to look for comma separated lists (of *any* words/phrases...not specific ones) in order to automatically shuffle their order and put them back into the sentence.

This most definitely calls for a regular expression.

 

this should work. it will find any word or number proceeded by a ,

/([a-z0-9]+(?=(?:\s{1,})?,(?:\s{1,})?))/i

PHP:

now there's probably a few other ways and perhaps better ones as well but hopefully this will get you started.