Question

I need a PHP function that will take a string as input, and return the string minus all occurrences of these characters:
! * ‘ ( ) ; : @ & = + $ , / ? % # [ ]

Is there something already built for this purpose or can it be accomplished with regex? I’d rather not do 20 different str_replace function calls on this string. Thanks!

Answer 1

You can use str_replace with arrays:

// $arrayOfCharsToReplace = array('!','*', ...etc

$clean = str_replace(
    $arrayOfCharsToReplace, 
    array_fill(0, count($arrayOfCharsToReplace), ''), // array of empty strings
    $unclean
);

You can also use strtr like so:

// $arrayOfReplacements = array('!' => '', '*' => '', ...etc

$clean = strtr($unclean, $arrayOfReplacements);