CODEWITHSUNDEEP
phpregexpreg-replace
Milos Cuculovic
Milos Cuculovic

Reputation: 20223

PHP preg_replace removes the whitespace

I have a string:

$test = "Test string<i> hello world</i>."

Then I am running

$test = preg_replace('/(<i>{1}\s*)([\w*\d*\D*\W*\x*\O*\S*\s*]*?)(<\/i>{1})/', '<italic>$2</italic>', $test);

And the result is

Test string<italic>hello world</italic>.

Why is the whitespace before the hello world lost?

Here is an example http://pastebin.com/SXFhsCGK.

Thank you.

Upvotes: 0

Views: 66

Answers (1)

Robin
Robin

Reputation: 9644

Solution

As @Reeno puts it in the comments, replacing the <i> tags by <italic> ones directly is the way to go (assuming they're all tags you want to replace):

preg_replace('%<(/?)i>%', '<$1italic>', $test)

What was wrong with your regex

The space is lost because it is matched by the \s* in <i>{1}\s*, so it's not in the capturing group.

Also, writing [\w\W...] means "match any character that is either alphanumeric OR any character that is not alphanumeric"... So basically, match everything.

And the {1} quantifier is (always?) useless (>{1} is equivalent to >).

Heuristically, what you wanted to do was use this regex (s is so that the dot matches newline too):

~<i>(.*?)</i>~s

Upvotes: 2

Related Questions