3 replies to this topic

[Torrodon]

I need to match all symbols except letters, numbers, "_", " ", "-", "&"? I tried the following but it is not working:

preg_match_all ( '/[^a-z0-9_ -&]/i' , $string , $matches );

[John]

Jordan, you don't need to escape the space or ampersand. You only need to escape characters with special meaning like the hyphen inside a character class (or you can place the hyphen at the end). Also the `i' modifier at the end makes the expression case insensitive so the A-Z is redundant. I would use

'/[^\w\s&-]/i'

It should do the same thing, but its a lot easier to read.

The meta character \w matches any alphanumeric character plus the underscore
The meta character \s matches a space

Note: This expression only matches one character. If you want it to match more than one you need to add a star or plus quantifier to the character class.

[Torrodon]

grrr i forgot '-' is special symbol inside [] and i have to escape it
thanks