return words spaces numbers or match everything expect special chars like *&$!^& ?

Question

ok i have some string

'Hello^<php>World&*124><
i ju*st press enteR'

how do i return it to ( a function is better ? )

'Hello World123
i just press enter'

allow

• numbers
• text
• spaces , newline , etc

how do i do that with a regex? do i have to use regex? is there a another way ?

Thanks

Adam Ramadhan

Answer 1

You can do this:

function removeBad($str)
{
  return preg_replace("/[^a-zA-Z0-9_ (\n|\r\n)]+/", "", $str);
}

This will remove anything other than alphabet, numbers, space and newline

If you also want to remove any tags such as <php> in your text, you could do:

function removeBad($str)
{
  $str = strip_tags($str);
  return preg_replace("/[^a-zA-Z0-9_ (\n|\r\n)]+/", "", $str);
}

Usage:

$str = removeBad('Hello^<php>World&*124><');
echo $str;

Result:

HelloWorld124

.

$str = removeBad('i ju*st press EnteR');
echo $str;

Result:

i just press EnteR

Answer 2

Regex substitution can do this for you. I think that you need two. The first one to remove everything between the < and > characters. The second one to remove any character that is NOT in your allowed character set. That is the safest way to do it.