Question

I have folowing string:

a&b.c'd,e f

How do I look like

а_b_c_d_e_f

How look like the regex pattern?

Thanks in advance !

Answer 1

It will look as simple as…

$str = "a&b.c'd,e f";
$str = preg_replace('#\W#', '_', $str);

… but it should actually depend on what characters you consider special, as \W is equivalent to [^a-zA-Z0-9_] (i.e., anything that is not alphanumeric or ‘_’). It may or may not be sufficient in your case; if not, perhaps you’d just use a character class here:

$str = "a&b.c'd,e f";
$str = preg_replace('#[^a-zA-Z0-9_-]#', '_', $str);

In this example hyphen '-' won’t be replaced as well.