Question

I’ve imported an old guestbook into drupal, but some smilies from old system will be deleted, so I need to delete it from my content string

smilies example: :lol: :nice: ...

as you can see all of them are inside : without spaces, this is my code but have some issues with spaces.

preg_match_all( '/\:(.*?)\:/', $string, $matches );

string example: :p hello to everybody :lol:

return :p hello to everybody :

So, I need to remove only the :?:
Any ideas to make it work?

Answer 1

/\:(\w+)\:/ or /\:([^\s]+)\:/

ps: not sure that you have to escape colons and you do not need parenthesis here, but it is up to you 🙂