Question

I have a string:

[startstring]hello = guys[endstring] hello guys [startstring]jerk = you[endstring] man this is good!!!

I would like remove everything in between [startstring] and [endstring], all the matches, and also remove the [startstring] and [endstring] from the string. So like the result would be:

hello guys  man this is good!!!

and the deleted stuff would be:

[startstring]hello = guys[endstring] hello guys [startstring]jerk = you[endstring] man this is good!!!

See what I mean?

I would like to echo the resulted stuff, without the [startstring] and [endstring] stuff, as shown above. 🙂

Hope I’m mostly clear. 🙂

How would I go about accomplishing this in PHP? Would this envolve some sort of RegEx? Could you provide a sample code?

Thanks so much in advance! 🙂

Edit: Could this code be modified or be used somewhat to complete the task?

preg_match_all('/\[startstring\](.*?)\[endstring\]/s', $input, $matches);

Answer 1

To achieve that you just need to change your method name, you should use preg_replace instead preg_match_all:

preg_replace ($pattern, $replacement, $subject)  

Searches subject for matches to pattern and replaces them with replacement.

Code

$input = "[startstring]hello = guys[endstring] hello guys [startstring]jerk = you[endstring] man this is good!!!";
$output = preg_replace('/\[startstring\](.*?)\[endstring\]/s', '', $input);

Output

hello guys man this is good!!!