Question

I needed to write a custom module in drupal to help out with my location search. Initially I simply needed to remove a comma from queries, and then I realized that I would need to replace all instances of states with their abbreviation (California -> CA) because of how information is stored in my database. However, upon doing this I found out that my method of using preg_replace seems to be dependent on upper/lowercase. So in this line:

$form_state['values'] = preg_replace("/alabama/", 'al', $form_state['values']);

“alabama” will be replaced with “al”, but “Alabama” or “ALABAMA” will not. Is there a way to replace any instance of Alabama with its abbreviation without accounting for every possible variation in casings?

Answer 1

$form_state['values'] = preg_replace("/alabama/i", 'al', $form_state['values']);

The ‘i’ modifier will make the pattern case-insensitive.