Regular Expressions Help

Hi,

There are two types of strings:

1) AAA BBB CCC - DDD &(&) FFF

2) AAA BBB CCC - DDD

How can I create a pattern in preg_replace to achieve the following:

AAA-BBB-CCC-DDD-FFF

or

AAA-BBB-CCC-DDD

I tried the following but not familiar with the syntax:

     $patterns[0] = ' '; //white space
     $patterns[1] = ' '.'-'.' ';//white space + '-' + white space
     $patterns[2] = ' '. '&'. ' ';//white space + & + white space
     $replacements[0] = '-';//replace white space with dash
     $replacements[1] = '-';//space - dash - space with dash
     $replacements[2] = '-';//space - & - space with dash

echo preg_replace($patterns, $replacements, $string);

PHP:

I need a general pattern to get rid of "&" (if there is) and white spaces
Thanks

 

Hmm.. I'm not too good at regexp but maybe this will work:

preg_replace('/[^a-z0-9]/i','-',$string);
//it should replace all characters which aren't a-z or 0-9 with "-"

Let me know if it works
It would need to be changed to get rid of specific things ( & )
but its a general way to get rid of &+white space

 

Hi,

Thanks for the reply, I tried this but it gives:

AAA-BBB-CCC---DDD-&-FFF

	  $title = preg_replace("/(&| |[\s])*$/i", '', str_replace( ' ', '-', $title ));

PHP:

The worst case I would not mind & but triple dashes (---) do not seem good.

 

$title = preg_replace('/&/', '-', $string);
$title = preg_replace('/[^a-z0-9]+/i', '-', $title);

Code (markup):

 

Thanks for the reply Aboyd, it worked!

So the trick is using [^a-z0-9]+ which replaces triple dashes into one. (+)

Is that correct?

 

Ah yeh.. My pattern was missing the +

+ matches 1 or more