Question

I’m looking to replace all standalone numbers from a string where the number has no adjacent characters (including dashes), example:

Test 3 string 49Test 49test9 9

Should return Test string 49Test 49Test9

So far I’ve been playing around with:

   $str = 'Test 3 string 49Test 49test9 9';
   $str= preg_replace('/[^a-z\-]+(\d+)[^a-z\-]+?/isU', ' ', $str);
   echo $str;

However with no luck, this returns

Test string 9Test 9test9

leaving out part of the string, i thought to add [0-9] to the matches, but to no avail, what am I missing, seems so simple?

Thanks in advance

Answer 1

Try using a word boundary and negative look-arounds for hyphens, eg

$str = preg_replace('/\b(?<!-)\d+(?!-)\b/', '', $str);