I need to remove all characters from a string which aren't in az AZ 0-9
set or are not spaces.
Does anyone have a function to do this?
Sounds like you almost knew what you wanted to do already, you basically defined it as a regex.
preg_replace("/[^A-Za-z0-9 ]/", '', $string);
For unicode characters, it is:
preg_replace("/[^[:alnum:][:space:]]/u", '', $string);
Regular expression is your answer.
$str = preg_replace('/[^a-z\d ]/i', '', $str);
i
stands for case insensitive. ^
means, does not start with. \d
matches any digit. az
matches all characters between a
and z
. Because of the i
parameter you don't have to specify az
and AZ
.\d
there is a space, so spaces are allowed in this regex. here's a really simple regex for that:
\W|_
and used as you need it (with a forward /
slash delimiter).
preg_replace("/\W|_/", '', $string);
Test it here with this great tool that explains what the regex is doing:
[\W_]+
$string = preg_replace("/[\W_]+/u", '', $string);
It select all not AZ, az, 0-9 and delete it.
See example here: https://regexr.com/3h1rj
If you need to support other languages, instead of the typical AZ, you can use the following:
preg_replace('/[^\p{L}\p{N} ]+/', '', $string);
[^\p{L}\p{N} ]
defines a negated (It will match a character that is not defined) character class of:
\p{L}
: a letter from any language. \p{N}
: a numeric character in any script.
: a space character. +
greedily matches the character class between 1 and unlimited times. This will preserve letters and numbers from other languages and scripts as well as AZ:
preg_replace('/[^\p{L}\p{N} ]+/', '', 'hello-world'); // helloworld
preg_replace('/[^\p{L}\p{N} ]+/', '', 'abc@~#123-+=öäå'); // abc123öäå
preg_replace('/[^\p{L}\p{N} ]+/', '', '你好世界!@£$%^&*()'); // 你好世界
Note: This is a very old, but still relevant question. I am answering purely to provide supplementary information that may be useful to future visitors.
preg_replace("/\W+/", '', $string)
You can test it here: http://regexr.com/
I was looking for the answer too and my intention was to clean every non-alpha and there shouldn't have more than one space.
So, I modified Alex's answer to this, and this is working for me preg_replace('/[^az|\s+]+/i', ' ', $name)
The regex above turned sy8ed sirajul7_islam
to sy ed sirajul islam
Explanation: regex will check NOT ANY from a to z in case insensitive way or more than one white spaces, and it will be converted to a single space.
You can split the string into characters and filter it.
<?php
function filter_alphanum($string) {
$characters = str_split($string);
$alphaNumeric = array_filter($characters,"ctype_alnum");
return join($alphaNumeric);
}
$res = filter_alphanum("a!bc!#123");
print_r($res); // abc123
?>
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