Question

I am looking to remove all alpha-numeric characters from a string and replace with a space (using PHP). The input is coming from a textarea that has data pasted into it from various places like word, excel, websites, emails etc.

I was using this regex

/[^a-zA-Z0-9\s]/

But I found that there are still Vertical Tabs (ascii #13). I want my end result to only include letters and numbers, no newline, tab, vertical tabs etc

Many thanks!

Answer 1

Vertical tabs are matched by the whitespace character (\s)

If you want to replace every non-alpha-numeric character with a space, use

preg_replace('/[^a-zA-Z0-9]/', ' ', $string)

If you want to replace every group (consecutive characters) of non-alnums with a single space, use

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