Question

I am currently using what appears to be a horribly complex and unnecessary solution to form a required string.

The string could have any punctuation and will include slashes.

As an example, this string:

Test Ripple, it\'s a comic book one!

Using my current method:

str_replace(" ", "-", trim(preg_replace('/[^a-z0-9]+/i', ' ', str_replace("'", "", stripslashes($string)))))

Returns the correct result:

Test-Ripple-its-a-comic-book-one

Here is a breakdown of what my current (poor) solution is doing in order to achieve the desired output:-

1. Strip all slashes from the string
2. remove any apostrophes with str_replace
3. remove any remaining punctuation using preg_replace and replace it with whitespace
4. Trim off any extra whitespace from the beginning/end of string which may have been caused by punctuation.
5. Replace all whitespace with ‘-‘

But there must be a better and more efficient way. Can anyone help?

Answer 1

Personally it looks fine to me however I would make one small change.

Change

preg_replace("/[^a-z0-9]+/i"

to the following

preg_replace("/[^a-zA-Z0-9\s]/"