CODEWITHSUNDEEP
phpregexstring
Samuel Benares
Samuel Benares

Reputation: 59

PHP Remove Text Between [ and ] Parentheses

I need to remove text included between [ and ] parentheses (and parentheses, too).

For example:

Hello, [how are you]

Must become:

Hello,

And, a string like:

hello, [how][are] you

must become:

hello, you

There is a regula expression to do that?

Upvotes: 5

Views: 5153

Answers (4)

Casimir et Hippolyte
Casimir et Hippolyte

Reputation: 89639

You can use this if you want to deal with nested brackets and extra horizontal whitespaces:

$txt = preg_replace('~\h*\[(?:[^][]+|(?R))*+]\h*~', ' ', $txt);

or with an unrolled loop:

$txt = preg_replace('~\h*\[[^][]*+(?:(?R)[^][]*)*+]\h*~', ' ', $txt);

Upvotes: 3

alpha bravo
alpha bravo

Reputation: 7948

use this pattern \[.*?\](?![^\[\]]*\]) to handle nesting as well Demo

Upvotes: 0

Sabuj Hassan
Sabuj Hassan

Reputation: 39443

what about this?

print preg_replace('/\[[^\[\]]*\]/', '', $str);

Upvotes: 0

Maxime Lorant
Maxime Lorant

Reputation: 36181

You just need to remove everything between [] with the preg_replace function.

$a = 'hello, [how][are] you';

echo preg_replace('#\s*\[.+\]\s*#U', ' ', $a); // hello, you

The regex catches every spaces before and after and replace it with a single space.

Be careful, [ and ] are reserved characters in regex, you need to escape them with \. If you want to keep the possibility to write [] in your string (without anything between), you can transform the .* in .+.

Upvotes: 7

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