CODEWITHSUNDEEP
phpregexemoji
StackOverflower
StackOverflower

Reputation: 1097

PHP Regex Strip Away All Emojis

I am trying to strip away all non-allowed characters from a string using regex. Here is my current php code

$input = "👮";

$pattern = "[a-zA-Z0-9_ !@#$%^&*();\\\/|<>\"'+\-.,:?=]";
$message = preg_replace($pattern,"",$input);

if (empty($message)) {
    echo "The string is empty";
}
else {
    echo $message;
}

The emoji gets printed out when I run this when I want it to print out "The string is empty.".

When I put my regex code into http://regexr.com/ it shows that the emoji is not matching, but when I run the code it gets printed out. Any suggestions?

Upvotes: 4

Views: 4729

Answers (2)

Bruno
Bruno

Reputation: 1128

This pattern should do the trick :

$filteredString = preg_replace('/([^-\p{L}\x00-\x7F]+)/u', '', $rawString);

Some sequences are quite rare, so let's explain them:

  • \p{L} matches any kind of letter from any language
  • \x00-\x7F a single character in the range between (index 0) and (index 127) (case sensitive)
  • the u modifier who turns on additional functionality of PCRE that is incompatible with Perl. Pattern and subject strings are treated as UTF-8.

Upvotes: 8

Amal Murali
Amal Murali

Reputation: 76656

Your pattern is incorrect. If you want to strip away all the characters that are not in the list provided, then you have to use a negating character class: [^...]. Also, currently, [ and ] are being used as delimiters, which means, the pattern isn't seen as a character class.

The pattern should be:

$pattern = "~[^a-zA-Z0-9_ !@#$%^&*();\\\/|<>\"'+.,:?=-]~";

This should now strip away the emoji and print your message.

Upvotes: 4

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