Question

My idea is to remove special characters and html codes and replace the whitespaces to dashes
let us doing it step by step

$text = "Hello world)<b> (*&^%$#@! it's me: and; love you.<p>";

now i’m want the output become Hello-world-its-me-and-love-you
I’ve tired this code for removal of special characters and html codes

$array = array();
$array[0] = "/<.+?>/";
$array[1] = "/[^a-zA-Z0-9 ]/";

$textout= preg_replace($array,"",$text);

Now the output will be like this Hello world its me and love you
so is there any way i can modify this code so that the text output become exact as i do needs Hello-world-its-me-and-love-you

~ thank you

Answer 1

You’re probably better off using strip_tags to get rid of the html tags for you, then use a regexp to remove all non alphanumeric (or non-space) characters. Then you can simply convert spaces to hyphens using str_replace. Note I also added a line to collapse multiple spaces to a single space, since that is what you did in your example. Otherwise you get world--its-me instead of world-its-me.

<?php    
    $text = "Hello world)<b> (*&^%$#@! it's me: and; love you.<p>";
    $text = strip_tags($text);
    $text = preg_replace('/[^a-zA-Z0-9 ]/', '', $text);

    //this is if you want to collapse multiple spaces to one
    $text = str_replace ('  ', ' ', $text); 

    $text = str_replace (' ', '-', $text);
?>