How to I remove special characters and spaces on a textfield using PHP

Question

I need to remove all special characters and spaces on a textfield for a form I'm building. How do I accomplish this in PHP.

Answer 1

Use the following regex during processing of the data:

$data = preg_replace('/[^A-Za-z0-9]/', "", $data);

This will remove all non-alphanumeric characters from the data.

Answer 2

$specialChars = array(" ", "\r", "\n");
$replaceChars = array("", "", "");

$str = str_replace($specialChars, $replaceChars, $str);

Answer 3

This really depends, I assume you are working with $_POST[] data and wish to sanitize those inputs? If so I would definitely do something like:

$var = preg_replace("/[^A-Za-z0-9]/", "", $var);

That will strip out everything other than alpha/num, you can adjust the regex to include other characters if you wish. Some great examples of commonly used regular expressions can be found at: The RegEx Library

If this isn't quite what you are looking for or have other questions let us know.