Question

I’m working on a php script that takes a list of movies from a
webservice, and store’em into a database.

Nothing fancy,
the only thing that I need to address now is a sort title which is the titile
of the movie stripped (where necessary) from the usuals ‘The‘ / ‘An‘ / ‘A‘.

e.g.

• The Dark Knight
• An Education
• A Separation

should become

• Dark Knight
• Education
• Separation

simple as that, but considering my noobness in the regex field, I’m calling out for a help.
hope I made myself clear. Ask for clarifications if you find yourself in doubt.

Answer 1

You can try

$titles = array("The Dark Knight","An Education","A Separation");
$words = array('a','the','an');
$regex = '/\b^(' . implode('|', $words) . ')\b/i' ;

echo "<pre>";
foreach ( $titles as $title ) {
    echo preg_replace($regex, '', $title), PHP_EOL;
}

Output

 Dark Knight
 Education
 Separation