Question

In pnotepad it has a regular expression replace feature.

What I want to do is replace all spaces inside of POST variables with underscores.

For example, lets say I have a post variable named $_POST['Apples And Pears'].

I am trying to figure out the regex replace to turn it into $_POST['Apples_And_Pears'].

Any help would be awesome, I know how to do this with ALL spaces, but not the spaces that are only inside POST variables.

I need this because I have a LOT of POST variables inside a PHP file that I need to perform this operation on.

Answer 1

I’m not sure about pnotepad’s syntax, but from a cursory glance it looks like pnotepad adheres to PCRE, so replace this:

((?<=\$_POST\[[^[]*) )

with this:

_

(I added an unnecessary set of parentheses just to show the space at the end.)

This uses a positive lookbehind assertion to say, “If I am a space character and behind me is a string of non-[ characters preceded by $_POST[, then replace me.”

If this doesn’t work, the problem is probably that, like many engines, pnotepad doesn’t support arbitrary-length lookbehind assertions. In that case, you’ll have to replace this:

(?:(\$_POST\[[^[]*) )

with this:

$1

and manually keep replacing over and over until no more replacements can be made.