How to read only A-Z and a-z from a PHP file

Question

I want to read only the alphabetic content from a file and neglect the rest of the special characters. How to achieve this?

I intend to use $content = file_get_contents($argv[1]);

How can I make sure $contents does not contain any special character.

Answer 1

If you need to extract only AZ and az, use this:

test.txt

abcdzjsi3424mmdnsn12312312

test.php

$content = file_get_contents('test.txt');
$only_az = preg_replace('/[^a-zA-Z\s]/', '', $content);
echo $only_az; //Output: abcdzjsimmdnsn

Hope this works.

Answer 2

$content = preg_match_all('/[a-zA-Z]/', $content );