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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-27T09:25:51+00:00

So I need to filter/replace text in PHP to make sure there are spaces

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So I need to filter/replace text in PHP to make sure there are spaces around dashes.

Example: “Shirts-general” needs to become “Shirts – general”
but I don’t want extra spaces, so “Shirts – general” does change to “Shirts – general”(with 2 spaces on each side of the dash.

There will always be a space or text on each side of the dash.

Right now I am using the following and it works, but takes forever (I am checking about 900,000 variables with this code). When I added this my script went from 4 minutes to 52 minutes. 

$myText = preg_replace("/(.)(-)(.)/", "$1 - $3", $myText);

Ideas?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    The following should be faster:

    preg_replace("/ ?- ?/", " - ", $txt);

    And here’s a variant with only one call to str_replace:

    str_replace(array(' -', '- ', ' - ', '-'), array('-', '-', '-', ' - '), $txt);

    Here’s an example of both working: http://codepad.org/zqf4LRVD

    I’m too lazy to do the performance comparison, but I would be curious to find out which is faster.

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