Question

OK,I know that I should use a DOM parser, but this is to stub out some code that’s a proof of concept for a later feature, so I want to quickly get some functionality on a limited set of test code.

I’m trying to strip the width and height attributes of chunks HTML, in other words, replace

width='number' height='number' 

with a blank string.

The function I’m trying to write looks like this at the moment:

function remove_img_dimensions($string,$iphone) {     $pattern = 'width=\'[0-9]*\'';     $string = preg_replace($pattern, '', $string);      $pattern = 'height=\'[0-9]*\'';     $string = preg_replace($pattern, '', $string);      return $string; } 

But that doesn’t work.

How do I make that work?

Answer 1

PHP is unique among the major languages in that, although regexes are specified in the form of string literals like in Python, Java and C#, you also have to use regex delimiters like in Perl, JavaScript and Ruby.

Be aware, too, that you can use single-quotes instead of double-quotes to reduce the need to escape characters like double-quotes and backslashes. It’s a good habit to get into, because the escaping rules for double-quoted strings can be surprising.

Finally, you can combine your two replacements into one by means of a simple alternation:

$pattern = '/(width|height)='[0-9]*'/i';