Question

Is it possible using PHP to strip everything from a string after and including the first ‘non’ letter?

E.g.

Blue Bayou (1954) becomes Blue Bayou

Hello World: 1234 becomes Hello World

Answer 1

That’s doable with preg_replace as follows:

$str = preg_replace('/[^\w\s].*$/', "", $str);

The /[^\w\s].+$/ is the small regex micro-program. It looks for the first character that is neither a letter \w or a space \s and matches anything else .* after that.

And "" is the empty string which replaces the matched parts. Note that a space after Bayou will be kept in example 1. (Wanted to keep the example short. But see the comment! ha)