Question

I’ve got a huge problem. I made a special ID for the things in our webpage. Let’s see an example:

H0059 – this is the special ID called registration number. The last two chars are the things’ id.

I’d like to cut off the useless characters, to get the real ID, what means strip the first char, and all the 0s before any other numbers.

Example:

L0745 => 745, V1754 => 1754, L0003 => 3, B0141 => 141, P0040 => 40, V8000 => 8000

Please help me in this.

I’ve tried with strreplace and explode but failed 🙁 Thanks for the help.

Answer 1

You can use:

preg_replace("/^[^1-9]*(.*?)$/","$1",$str) as:

<?php

$arr = array('L0745','V1754', 'L0003', 'B0141', 'P0040', 'V8000');

foreach($arr as $str) {

    $str = preg_replace("/^[^1-9]*(.*?)$/","$1",$str);

    var_dump($str);
}

?>

Output:

C:\>php a.php
string(3) "745"
string(4) "1754"
string(1) "3"
string(3) "141"
string(2) "40"
string(4) "8000"

Explanation of the regex used: ^[^1-9]*(.*?)$

• ^ – Anchor to start matching at the
  beg of the string.
• $ – Anchor to match end of the
  string.
• [1-9] – A single non-zero digit
• [^1-9] – A single non 1-9 char…can
  include 0 or any other alphabet.
• .*? – to match the rest
• () – group and remember…and use in replacement.

This regex first by passes non 1-9 char at the beg of the string and matches and remembers the rest till the end …and replaces the whole string with the remembered thing.