Question

I am using cakephp. And I have textarea field where users paste data, I using tinymce plugin to format text. I have warned users not to enter telephone number or email address inside the textarea. But, I dont want to take chances.

Is there a way I can extract the telephone number and email from textarea and replace it something like [e-mail]..

I appreciate any help.

Thanks.

Answer 1

Here’s something off the top of my head for replacing the e-mail address with hidden:

$str = "My e-mail is [e-mail] Contact me for more details";
$str = preg_replace("/([a-zA-Z0-9\._]+)(@[a-zA-Z0-9\-\.]+)/", "hidden\\2", $str);
print($str);

The e-mail regex is not the best, but it’s something that works for your example. You can get more interesting regexes (emails and phone numbers) at http://www.regexlib.com/ and use them with a simple preg_replace.