How to match and replace in a mouthful with PHP?

Question

Something like this,but I don't want to do it 2 times:

preg_match_all($pattern,$string,$matches);
$string = preg_replace($pattern,'',$string);

Answer 1

you mean something like this?

$string = preg_replace(preg_match_all($pattern,$string,$matches),'',$string);

Update:

I thought so you want something like this .. but you could see now that its not possible without complicating things (as @gnud answer). So answer is No, you can't do it in one line.

Answer 2

OK,

so you want to capture the matches, and replace, in one function call. I'm guessing that you don't want to process a costly regex twice, otherwise I can see no good reason to want to make your code less readable.

Anyway,

you could try using preg_replace_callback(). Something like:

class MatchReplace {

    var $matches;
    var $pattern;
    var $replacement;
    var $string;
    var $matchCount;

    function __construct($pattern, $replacement) {
     $this->replacement = $replacement;
     $this->pattern = $pattern;
    }

    function matchAndReplace($string) {
     $this->string = $string;

     var_dump($string);
     var_dump($this->pattern);

     return preg_replace_callback($this->pattern, 
       array($this, '_worker'), $string, -1, $this->matchCount);
    }


    function _worker($matches) {
     echo "Matches:\n";
     var_dump($matches);
    }
}

Example run:

echo "<pre>\n";
$m = new MatchReplace('|(abc)|', '');
echo "\nResult: \n".$m->matchAndReplace('XXXabcYYY');

echo "\n</pre>";

Output:

string(9) "XXXabcYYY"
string(7) "|(abc)|"
Matches:
array(2) {
  [0]=>
  string(3) "abc"
  [1]=>
  string(3) "abc"
}

Result: 
XXXYYY

Answer 3

If you don't need fancy replacing rules (like regular expressions), you should always use str_replace() function instead of ereg_replace() or preg_replace().

http://uk.php.net/str%5Freplace

This will do all occurrences and only 1 command.

Answer 4

By the looks of it you are doing 2 completely separate things.

preg_match_all($pattern,$string,$matches); // return all the matches
$string = preg_replace($pattern,'',$string); // replace all the matches in the string

So you aren't actually doing anything twice. Unless you are using $matches somewhere further down the line, the first line is irrelevant if you are going to do the preg_replace afterwords anyway.

Answer 5

preg_match_all($pattern1,$string,$matches);
$result = preg_grep($pattern2, $matches);