Question

I am trying to remove everything between two characters, including the two characters, from a string using regex in php. I tried using the answer on this page so now I have a line in my php file which looks like this :

$message = preg_replace('\[[^\]]*]', '', $message);

The problem is I get this error:

Warning: preg_replace() [function.preg-replace]: Delimiter must not be alphanumeric or backslash

How can I fix this?

Answer 1

Regular expressions in PHP need to be delimited:

$message = preg_replace('/\[[^\]]*]/', '', $message);

Check out this documentation.

Also as a side note, you don’t need to escape the closing ] if it is the first character in a character class:

$message = preg_replace('/\[[^]]*]/', '', $message);

(Whether that is more readable in this case is debatable. But it’s good to know.)