Replacing items in an array using two regular expressions

Question

Can you use two regex in preg_replace to match and replace items in an array? So for example:

Assume you have:

Array 
(
    [0] => mailto:[email protected]
    [1] => mailto:[email protected]
    [2] => mailto:[email protected]
    [3] => mailto:[email protected]
    [4] => mailto:[email protected]
    [5] => mailto:[email protected]
    [6] => mailto:[email protected]
}

and you have two variables holding regex strings:

 $reg = '/mailto:[\w-]+@([\w-]+\.)+[\w-]+/i';
 $replace = '/[\w-]+@([\w-]+\.)+[\w-]+/i';

can I:

preg_replace($reg,$replace,$matches);

In order to replace "mailto:[email protected]" with "[email protected]" in each index of the array.

Answer 1

foreach($array as $ind => $value)
  $array[$ind] = preg_replace('/mailto:([\w-]+@([\w-]+\.)+[\w-]+)/i', '$1', $value);

EDIT: gahooa's solution is probably better, because it moves the loop inside preg_replace.

Answer 2

You could try this:

$newArray = preg_replace('/mailto:([\w-]+@([\w-]+\.)+[\w-]+)/i', '$1', $oldArray);

^{Haven't tested}

See here: http://php.net/manual/en/function.preg-replace.php

Answer 3

I think that you are looking for the '$1' submatch groups, as others have already pointed out. But why can't you just do the following:

// strip 'mailto:' from the start of each array entry
$newArray = preg_replace('/^mailto:\s*/i', '', $array);

In fact, seeing as your regex doesn't allow the use of ':' anywhere in the email addresses, you could do it with a simple str_replace():

// remove 'mailto:' from each item
$newArray = str_replace('mailto:', '', $array);

Answer 4

For this type of substitution you should use str_replace it is mutch faster and strongly suggested by the online documentation:

   $array = str_replace('mailto:', '', $array);