Question

The problem I’m encountering with this is if I have single characters in the array $wordstodelete it then deletes them from words in the $oneBigDescription.

$oneBigDescription = str_replace ( $wordstodelete, '', $oneBigDescription);

So it makes it look like this:

array (size=51)
  'blck' => int 5
  'centrl' => int 6
  'clssc' => int 6
  'club' => int 10
  'crs' => int 54
  'deler' => int 7
  'delers' => int 5
  'engl' => int 6
  'felne' => int 8
  'gude' => int 5
  'hot' => int 5
  'jgur' => int 172
  'jgurs' => int 5
  'lke' => int 6

Is there a way to only delete the single character from $oneBigDescription if it is on its own?

Answer 1

$oneBigDescription = preg_replace("/\b$wordstodelete\b/", '', $oneBigDescription);

/b should look for word boundaries to ensure it’s an isolated word when one character is used.

EDIT: Didn’t quite read that right – this is more assuming you’re looping over $wordstodelete as an array of words.

So, something like this:

$desc = "blah blah a b blah";
$wordstodelete = array("a", "b");
foreach($wordstodelete as $delete)
{
    $desc= preg_replace("/\b$delete\b/", "", $desc);
}

EDIT2: Wasn’t quite happy with this, so refined slightly:

$arr = "a delete aaa a b me b";
$wordstodelete = array("a", "b");
$regex = array();
foreach($wordstodelete as $word)
{
    $regex[] = "/\b$word\b\s?/";
}
$arr = preg_replace($regex, '', $arr);

This account for taking out the following space, which in HTML isn’t usually an issue when rendered (since consecutive spaces aren’t generally rendered), but still a good idea to take it out. This also creates an array of regex expressions up front, which seems a bit nicer.