Question

I have a string:

“Hello, my name is blah blah (goodbye) (hello) (oops)”

How do I remove “(hello)” but leaving the other two bracketed words?

I’m doing this right now in PHP but it removes ALL occurrences of brackets and anything inside them. I want to target a specific word, then remove the word and the surrounding brackets.

$newName= trim(preg_replace('/\s*\([^)]*\)/', '', $name));

Answer 1

Don’t use regex for such an easy operation

$newName = trim(str_replace("(hello)", "", $name));

in order to remove more values, you don’t even need to use str_replace multiple times, just pass array to the first argument

$remove = array(
    "(oops)",
    "(hello)"
); 
$newName = trim(str_replace($remove, "", $name));