Hi,
how do I strip off all white space and ?
I have this as a input in a wrapper I create,
[b] bold [/b]
so before turning the text to bold, i want to strip off all white spaces and  , and turn it into [b]bold[/b],
$this->content = preg_replace("/\[(.*?)\]\s\s+(.*?)\s\s+\[\/(.*?)\]/",
"[$1]$2[/$3]",
$this->content);
but it does not work! can you help please?
Many thanks, Lau
There is no need for a regex based solution. You can simply use str_replace as:
$input = "[b] bold [/b]";
$input = str_replace(array(' ',' '),'',$input);
echo $input; // prints [b]bold[/b]
You can just replace the spaces with empty strings, e.g.
preg_replace("/(?:\s| )+/", "", $this->content, -1)
The -1 causes the replace to hit every instance of the match.
$this->content = preg_replace(
'~\[(.*?)](?:\s| )*(.*?)(?:\s| )*\[/\\1]/',
'[$1]$2[/$1]',
$this->content
);
To give you a complete solution with regular expressions as well:
$this->content = preg_replace( '/\[([a-z]+)\](?: |\s)*(.*?)(?: |\s)*\[\/([a-z]+)\]/', '[$1]$2[/$3]', $this->content );
But in this case you should rather combine the whitespace removal and bbcode transformation to make sure that the tags are correctly:
$this->content = preg_replace( '/\[b\](?: |\s)*(.*?)(?: |\s)*\[\/b]/', '<b>$2</b>', $this->content );
Another method that would work is:
$this->content = trim(str_replace(' ','',$this->content));
PHP Manual links:
trim() http://us.php.net/trim
*note: This is assuming $this->content contains only the string posted by OP
I found another solution
$this->content = preg_replace("/\[(.*?)\]\s*(.*?)\s*\[\/(.*?)\]/", "[$1]$2[/$3]", html_entity_decode($this->content));
thank you so much guys!