CODEWITHSUNDEEP
phppreg-replace
EricImprint
EricImprint

Reputation: 177

preg_replace usage or alternative

So I need to filter/replace text in PHP to make sure there are spaces around dashes.

Example: "Shirts-general" needs to become "Shirts - general" but I don't want extra spaces, so "Shirts - general" does change to "Shirts - general"(with 2 spaces on each side of the dash.

There will always be a space or text on each side of the dash.

Right now I am using the following and it works, but takes forever (I am checking about 900,000 variables with this code). When I added this my script went from 4 minutes to 52 minutes. 

$myText = preg_replace("/(.)(-)(.)/", "$1 - $3", $myText);

Ideas?

Upvotes: 2

Views: 1802

Answers (3)

deviousdodo
deviousdodo

Reputation: 9172

The following should be faster:

preg_replace("/ ?- ?/", " - ", $txt);

And here's a variant with only one call to str_replace:

str_replace(array(' -', '- ', ' - ', '-'), array('-', '-', '-', ' - '), $txt);

Here's an example of both working: http://codepad.org/zqf4LRVD

I'm too lazy to do the performance comparison, but I would be curious to find out which is faster.

Upvotes: 1

Will
Will

Reputation: 20235

This should be faster: preg_replace( "/\\s*-\\s*/", " - ", $myText );.

Upvotes: 1

thelastshadow
thelastshadow

Reputation: 3644

I think that's as quick as you'll get. You can try a double str_replace

$once = str_replace("-", " - ", $content);
$twice = str_replace("  -  ", " - ", $once);

this will obviously only work if you're not worried about having double spaces to begin with

Upvotes: 0

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