Question

I am using a rather simple regex to make links posted to change that area to say [LINK REMOVED]. What I want to do though, is to completely clear out anything they typed with one space, instead of just removing the link itself.

I am not that good with regexes yet, so I could really use the help! Here’s what I have at the moment.

$comment = preg_replace('%[a-zA-Z0-9\-\.]+\.
(com|org|net|mil|edu|COM|ORG|NET|MIL|EDU)%', '[LINK REMOVED]', $comment);

Answer 1

You could either consume the whole comment in the match:

$comment = preg_replace('%^.*[a-z0-9.-]+\.(com|org|net|mil|edu).*$%is', ' ', $comment);

Or simply use preg_match and delete the comment yourself:

if(preg_match('%[a-z0-9.-]+\.(com|org|net|mil|edu)%i', $comment))
    $comment = ' ';

Note that I also slightly optimized the regex by using the case-insensitive modifier i and removing unnecessary escapes in the character class (for this to work, the hyphen has to be at the end of the character class though).