When writing a form submit to a file, strip line breaks and commas

Question

I have a form with a textarea in it. I log the results to a text file on the server, but I would like to strip out any line breaks a user would put in the textarea, as well as any commas that would interfere with importing the comma-delimited log text file into Excel or something for later use.

I think this has to do with regex, but I'm no expert and could use some help. Or maybe there is an easy PHP function that will do it?

Answer 1

Using str_replace to replace a couple of characters by a space should work ; for example :

$str = "This is a \nnewline, and, some, commas\nagain";
$new_str = str_replace(array("\n", "\r", ","), " ", $str);
var_dump($new_str);

Will get you :

string 'This is a  newline  and  some  commas again' (length=43)

You could probably also use strtr for that :

$new_str = strtr($str, "\n\r,", "   ");

But note that, if escaping the data properly in your CSV file (using fputcsv, maybe ?), it should be able to contain newlines and commas without any problem -- at least if the software used to read it is respecting the standard too.

Answer 2

If you're only going to be doing a couple of characters, you can use str_replace

$cleaned_textarea_data = str_replace(
    array(",", "\n"), 
    array("", " "), 
    $textarea_data
);

Otherwise, if it gets more complicated, you can use preg_replace

$cleaned_textarea_data = pregr_replace("`[,\n]`", "", $textarea_data);