CODEWITHSUNDEEP
phpregexstringspecial-charactersstr-replace
Maarten Wolfsen
Maarten Wolfsen

Reputation: 1733

Remove all hyphens, special characters etc. from string in PHP

Is there a general used regex that removes ALL hyphens, special characters etc., so I will only get letters.

For example a regex containing: ,./<>?;':"|[]{}-=_+1234567890!@#$%^&*()|\ ~` and all of the hyphens and special characters.

(don't know if this is called a regex, but I hope you get the idea)

Upvotes: 5

Views: 11148

Answers (2)

Sofiene Djebali
Sofiene Djebali

Reputation: 4508

This should work : 

$string = preg_replace("/[^a-zA-Z]+/", "", $string);

if you want to keep numbers, use this one :

$string = preg_replace("/[^a-zA-Z0-9]+/", "", $string);

Upvotes: 10

Wiktor Stribiżew
Wiktor Stribiżew

Reputation: 626871

If you need to get only letters, remove all that are not letters:

preg_replace('~\P{L}+~u', '', $input)

The \P{L} is a Unicode property that matches all characters other than Unicode letters. See the regex demo.

If you need to also handle diacritics (i.e. if you need to keep them), use

preg_replace('~[^\p{M}\p{L}]+~u', '', $input)

where \p{M} matches any diacritic symbol, and [^\p{M}\p{L}]+ matches 1 or more characters other than letters and diacritics.

See another demo.

Upvotes: 3

Related Questions