CODEWITHSUNDEEP
phpstringpreg-replacestr-replace
Karan Goda
Karan Goda

Reputation: 37

String characters replacement PHP

I am very close to solving the problem, however I can't figure out how to remove whitespaces that surround the string. Eg: ' ! ', '! ', and ' !' become '!'. And this applies to the ? character, . character and other punctuation characters.

Here is my code so far. It is supposed to take characters and convert them to nato words which I have done, but my punctuation is wrong. Eg ' ! awesome. .! ' turns to ' ! Alfa Whiskey Echo Sierra Oscar Mike Echo . . !' when I dont want whitespaces between the punctuations.

function to_nato($words){
    $key = array("A", "B", "C", "D", "E", "F", "G", "H", "I", "J", "K", "L", "M", "N", "O", "P", "Q", "R", "S", "T", "U", "V", "W", "X", "Y", "Z");
    $translationKey = array("Alfa", "Bravo", "Charlie", "Delta", "Echo", "Foxtrot", "Golf", "Hotel", "India", "Juliet", "Kilo", "Lima", "Mike", "November", "Oscar", "Papa", "Quebec", "Romeo", "Sierra", "Tango", "Uniform", "Victor", "Whiskey", "Xray", "Yankee", "Zulu");
    $strToRet = "";
    for($i = 0; $i < strlen($words); $i++) {
        $letter = substr($words, $i, 1);
        if(ctype_alpha($letter)) {
            for($keySearch = 0; $keySearch < count($key); $keySearch++) {
                $letterToSearch = array_search($key[$keySearch], $key);
                if(strcasecmp($letter, $key[$letterToSearch]) == 0) {
                    $natoLetter = $translationKey[$letterToSearch];
                    $strToRet .= $natoLetter;
                }
            }
        }
        else {
            $strToRet .= $letter;
        }
    }
    $strToRet = preg_replace('/([a-z])([A-Z])/s','$1 $2', $strToRet);
    //$strToRet = str_replace(" ! ", "!", $strToRet, $count);
    return $strToRet;
}

Upvotes: 2

Views: 68

Answers (2)

Barmar
Barmar

Reputation: 780929

Remove the spaces around punctuation from the original string:

$words = preg_replace('/\s*([^\w\s]+)\s*/', '$1', $words);

DEMO

Upvotes: 0

curveball
curveball

Reputation: 4505

Try to change this if(ctype_alpha($letter) to this if(ctype_alpha($letter) || $letter==" "). I could get rid of that space in the result (using the input string you provided in the description).

Upvotes: 1

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