Question

I am totally new to preg_replace, but the code below removes the last word from my string:

preg_replace('/\W\w+\s*(\W*)$/', '$1', $var);

I am trying to modify it, so that it removes the last two words.

The only thing that I could think of was to replace $1 with $2, but this seems to not have any effect at all and was probably just dumb :/

The string in question looks kinda like this:

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet. Source: LOREM

I would like to remove Source: LOREM

Answer 1

A simple regular expression could match a space, followed by any number of letters (or a colon), followed by a space, followed by any number of letters at the end of a string:

$str = "Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet. Source: LOREM";
$str = preg_replace( "/\s[a-z:]+\s[a-z]+$/i", "", $str );

// Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet.
echo $str;

The expression broken down follows:

\s       // Single space
[a-z:]+  // Any letter, a to z, or a colon, 1 or more times
\s       // Single space
[a-z]+   // Any letter, a to z, 1 or more times
$        // End of string

Demo: http://codepad.org/G22LnDDY

One other method would be to use explode to create an array of words, and remove the last two.

$str = "Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet. Source: LOREM";
$words = explode( " ", $str );
array_splice( $words, -2 );

// Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet.
echo implode( " ", $words );

Demo: http://codepad.org/6XwqvwuP