replace special characters in a string in PHP using regex except certain chars

Question

I would like to replace all special characters in a string except space and -.

For example,

Hello-my näme *is (Jämes93!

to

Hello-my name is James93

or even

Hello-my nme is Jmes93

I have the following but it won't work. Pls can someone help? Thanks

preg_replace('#[^\w-]#',"",$string)

Answer 1

You don't want to use regex for these. You are much better off using iconv() with transliteration:

$result = iconv("UTF-8", "ASCII//TRANSLIT", $text);

This assumes that original string is encoded in UTF-8 and you want to convert it to ASCII which comes close to your question.

You can convert to/from other charsets the same way just as long as you know the original charset.

By the way, you can't do that with preg_replace, it does not support transliteration.

Answer 2

Just to answer your specific question, the problem with your code is that preg_replace doesn't actually change the string. You need to assign the result back to $string.

Answer 3

There are several ways to do it:

First method:

$string = "Hello-my näme *is (Jämes93!";

$chars = array(
        'Š'=>'S', 'š'=>'s', 'Đ'=>'D', 'đ'=>'d', 'Ž'=>'Z', 'ž'=>'z', 'Č'=>'C', 'č'=>'c', 'Ć'=>'C', 'ć'=>'c',
        'À'=>'A', 'Á'=>'A', 'Â'=>'A', 'Ã'=>'A', 'Ä'=>'A', 'Å'=>'A', 'Æ'=>'A', 'Ç'=>'C', 'È'=>'E', 'É'=>'E',
        'Ê'=>'E', 'Ë'=>'E', 'Ì'=>'I', 'Í'=>'I', 'Î'=>'I', 'Ï'=>'I', 'Ñ'=>'N', 'Ò'=>'O', 'Ó'=>'O', 'Ô'=>'O',
        'Õ'=>'O', 'Ö'=>'O', 'Ø'=>'O', 'Ù'=>'U', 'Ú'=>'U', 'Û'=>'U', 'Ü'=>'U', 'Ý'=>'Y', 'Þ'=>'B', 'ß'=>'Ss',
        'à'=>'a', 'á'=>'a', 'â'=>'a', 'ã'=>'a', 'ä'=>'a', 'å'=>'a', 'æ'=>'a', 'ç'=>'c', 'è'=>'e', 'é'=>'e',
        'ê'=>'e', 'ë'=>'e', 'ì'=>'i', 'í'=>'i', 'î'=>'i', 'ï'=>'i', 'ð'=>'o', 'ñ'=>'n', 'ò'=>'o', 'ó'=>'o',
        'ô'=>'o', 'õ'=>'o', 'ö'=>'o', 'ø'=>'o', 'ù'=>'u', 'ú'=>'u', 'û'=>'u', 'ý'=>'y', 'ý'=>'y', 'þ'=>'b',
        'ÿ'=>'y', 'Ŕ'=>'R', 'ŕ'=>'r',
    );
echo preg_replace('/[^a-zA-Z0-9 ]/s', '', strtr($string, $chars));

Second method:

echo iconv("UTF-8", "ISO-8859-1//TRANSLIT", $string);

But second method will not replace all the special alphabets. I prefer you to use first one.

Hope this helps you.

Answer 4

You can use code like this:

var_dump ( preg_replace('~[^A-Za-z\d\s-]+~u', '', ('Hello-my näme *is (Jämes93!')) );

OUTPUT:

string(22) "Hello-my nme is Jmes93"