PHP String Pattern Replace

Question

I have a set of strings like this:

Pants [+$50]
Shirts [+$10]
Jeans [+$5]
Jackets [+$100]

How can I remove the ' [xxx]' in these lines and leaving just the item name (without the trailing space)? I was told to define a regular expression, not sure how that works...

Answer 1

That's actually a bit of a confusing regex, since [ and ] are special characters:

$str = 'Pants [+$50]';
$str = rtrim(preg_replace('/\[[^\]]*\]/', '', $str));

// 'Pants'

Basically the partern \\[[^\\]]*\\] means to match a literal [ followed by 0 or more characters that are not ] followed by a ] . The second string in preg_replace is what it gets replaced with. In this case the empty string since we want to remove it. Then we use rtrim to trim any trailing whitespace.

Answer 2

Try this one:

The RegEx

(?im)[ \t]*\[[^\]\[]+\][ \t]*$

Code

$result = preg_replace('/^(.+?)[ \t]*\[[^\][]+\][ \t]*$/im', '$1', $subject);