Question

So I got a search box in a site we’re developing that will search in a database with both English and Greek product strings. I’m trying to clear the text input from all kinds of special characters like: / . , ‘ ] [ % & _ etc. and replace them with a space or totally delete them. Even double instances of them should be deleted, like ^^, &&, [[ etc.

I have been messing around with preg_replace but can’t find a solution…

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

With preg_replace you can do what you are looking for. In the next example all non a-z nor A-Z, nor / _ | + – characters are replaced by ” (nothing, empty string)

preg_replace("/[^a-zA-Z0-9\/_|+ -]/", '', $str);

add the characters you want to allow in that list and you will have your function.

Other way would be with str_replace() but here you have to insert one by one all the elements that you want to remove in different function calls.

I hope it helps