I'm making a CSV file, one of the database filed has stored a section called comments/note which obviously have some commas and line breaks in it too. Looked around the web found usage of preg_replace(), not much familiar with regular expressions there fore combined two different ones and not getting anything in result its totally blank and i know all records have some sort of comments in it
this i used
preg_replace( "/\r|\n/|/[,]/", "", $string )
Please what do I need to do here get one text back without line breaks and commas
Regards
You can do it using strip_tags() and preg_replace();
$clean_str = trim(preg_replace('/\s\s+/', '', strip_tags($string)));
or try this
$clean_str = str_replace(array("\r\n","\r","\n", ","), '', strip_tags($string));
Related
I am working with this daily data feed. To my surprise, one the fields didn't look right after it was in MySQL. (I have no control over who provides the feed.)
So I did a mysqldump and discovered the zip code and the city for this record contained a non-printing char. It displayed it in 'vi' as this:
<200e>
I'm working in PHP and I parse this data and put it into the MySQL database. I have used the trim function on this, but that doesn't get rid of it. The problem is, if you do a query on a zipcode in the MySQL database, it doesn't find the record with the non-printing character.
I'd like the clean this up before it's put into the MySQL database.
What can I do in PHP? At first I thought regular expression to only allow a-z,A-Z, and 0-9, but that's not good for addresses. Addresses use periods, commas, hyphens and perhaps other things I'm not thinking of at the moment.
What's the best approach? I don't know what it's called to define it exactly other than printing characters should only be allowed. Is there another PHP function like trim that does this job? Or regular expression? If so, I'd like an example. Thanks!
I have looked into using the PHP function, and saw this posted at PHP.NET:
<?php
$a = "\tcafé\n";
//This will remove the tab and the line break
echo filter_var($a, FILTER_SANITIZE_STRING, FILTER_FLAG_STRIP_LOW);
//This will remove the é.
echo filter_var($a, FILTER_SANITIZE_STRING, FILTER_FLAG_STRIP_HIGH);
?>
While using FILTER_FLAG_STRIP_HIGH does indeed strip out the <200e> I mentioned seen in 'vi', I'm concerned that it would strip out the letter's accent in a name such as André.
Maybe a regular expression is the solution?
You can use PHP filters: http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.filter-var.php
I would recommend on using the FILTER_SANITIZE_STRING filter, or anything that fits what you need.
I think you could use this little regex replace:
preg_replace( '/[^[:print:]]+/', '', $your_value);
It basically strip out all non-printing characters from $your_value
I tried this:
<?php
$string = "\tabcde éç ÉäÄéöÖüÜß.,!-\n";
$string = preg_replace('/[^a-z0-9\!\.\, \-éâëïüÿçêîôûéäöüß]/iu', '', $string);
print "[$string]";
It gave:
[abcde éç ÉäÄéöÖüÜß.,!-]
Add all the special characters, you need into the regexp.
If you work in English and do not need to support unicode characters, then allow just [\x20-\x7E]
...and remove all others:
$s = preg_replace('/[^\x20-\x7E]+/', '', $s);
I have a textarea submitting to my database on a website that is properly working. But when I generate a CSV (via PHP) from my database, all line breaks will mess up with the resulting CSV. Any CSV reader will interpret the line break from the input into a new line.
I have tried the following approaches:
Encapsulating the fields in quotation marks.
This:
$field = str_replace(array('\n', '\r', '\r\n', '\n\r'), ',', $original_field);
Also this:
$field = strip_tags(nl2br($original_field));
Combining all approaches above.
Anyhow, the ending result will still be a messed up CSV that will break on any line break inputted by user. I have managed to block new line breaks from the text area, but there's a lot of legacy submissions that need me to fix this on the CSV side as well.
Why is it not working? How can I fix this issue?
Before accepted answer (of user user1517891) is not correct, it will replace in string twice, when there is \r\n... It will replace it as two commas ,. First it will replace \r => ,, then \n => ,.
You need to use it in different order, as:
$field = str_replace(array("\r\n", "\n\r", "\n", "\r"), ',', $original_field);
Use double quotes:
$field = str_replace(array("\n", "\r", "\r\n", "\n\r"), ',', $original_field);
I'd suggest using preg_replace() for this rather than str_replace(). The reason is that there may be multiple newlines and combinations of \r and \n, and I would expect that you'd want to replace them all with just a single comma.
I'd also suggest using trim() to remove trailing blank lines.
$field = preg_replace('/[\n\r]+/', ',', trim($original_field));
You have to put \n and similar tags in double quotes otherwise they will be treated as simple strings and not as linebreaks.
I'm having trouble replacing apostrophes while uploading a csv file with a bunch of different descriptions.
Right now I have
$remarks = str_replace("'", "", $data[28]);
This gives me an error starting with the first apostrophe that shows up in my file. That first phrase where the apostrophe appears ends in "'s". If I change it to
$remarks = str_replace("'s", "", $data[28]);
it will go past that first problem and get to the next problem ('t).
What am I doing wrong? I'm new to php, and I'm sure this must be a simple solution...
array_map($data, function($a) { return(str_replace($a, "'", "")) });
should walk all elements of the array and replace all quotes for you.
It looks like you're trying to re-invent the wheel. It looks like you're trying to parse the csv yourself. If you are stop it. You should be using str_getcsv and you won't have to worry about escaping anything.
After that, you'll probably want to look into preg_replace.
preg_replace( "#'\w?#g", '', $data[$index] );
I'm having some problems with a "bb parser" I'm coding. Or, well, not with the parser itself, but the nl2br modifying it.
The string from the database is like the following:
text text text
[code]code code code[/code]
text text text
Now, nl2br puts one br / after the first "text text text", and then another one below that, so there's two line breaks before the [code] tag (which actually is correct, but not what I want).
Is there any way I can limit how many br's are entered in a row? I can't seem to find a solution that's simple enough.
Thanks in advance, guys.
In addition to previous solution, I add a different one, since Fredrik asked for it. This will replace double <br> after nl2br instead of before.
$string = nl2br( $string );
$string = preg_replace( '/(<br(?: \\/)?>\\r?\\n?\\r?)(?=\\1)/is', '', $string );
You could for example replace two linebreaks (or more) by one by using preg_replace :-)
You could use
$string = str_replace(array("\r\n\r\n", "\n\r\n\r", "\n\n", "\r\r"), array("\r\n","\n\r","\n","\r"), $string);
This prevents double <br> tags. Preg_replace as suggested before is better if there could be more than two new lines in a row.
I've tried about everything to delete some extra \n characters in a web application I'm working with. I was hoping someone has encountered this issue before and knows what can be causing this. All my JS and PHP files are UTF-8 encoded with no BOM.
And yes I've tried things like
In JS:
text.replace(/\n/g,"")
In PHP:
preg_replace("[\n]","",$result);
str_replace("\n","",$result);
and when I try
text.replace(/\n/g,"")
in the firebug console using the same string I get from the server it works but for reason it doesn't work in a JS file.
I'm desperate, picky and this is killing me. Any input is appreciated.
EDIT:
If it helps, I know how to use the replace functions above. I'm able to replace any other string or pattern except \n for some reason.
Answer Explanation:
Some people do and use what works because it just works. If you are like me and for the record I always like to know why what works WORKS!
In my case:
Why this works? str_replace('\n', '', $result)
And this doesn't? str_replace("\n", '', $result)
Looks identical right?
Well it seems that when you enclose a string with a character value like \n in double quotes "\n" it's seen as it's character value NOT as a string. On the other hand if you enclose it in single quotes '\n' it's really seen as the string \n. At least that is what i concluded in my 3 hours headache.
If what I concluded is a setup specific issue OR is erroneous please do let me know or edit.
In php, use str_replace(array('\r','\n'), '', $string).
I guess the problem is you also have \r's in your code (carriage returns, also displayed as newlines).
In javascript, the .replace() method doesn't modify the string. It returns a new modified string, so you need to reference the result.
text = text.replace(/\n/g,"")
Both of the PHP functions you tried return the altered string, they do not alter their arguments:
$result = preg_replace("[\n]","",$result);
$result = str_replace("\n","",$result);
Strangely, using
str_replace(array('\r','\n'), '', $string)
didn't work for me. I can't really work out why either.
In my situation I needed to take output from the a WordPress custom meta field, and then I was placing that formatted as HTML in a javascript array for later use as info windows in a Google Maps instance on my site.
If I did the following:
$stockist_address = $stockist_post_custom['stockist_address'][0];
$stockist_address = apply_filters( 'the_content', $stockist_address);
$stockist_sites_html .= str_replace(array('\r','\n'), '', $stockist_address);
This did not give me a string with the html on a single line. This therefore threw an error on Google Maps.
What I needed to do instead was:
$stockist_address = $stockist_post_custom['stockist_address'][0];
$stockist_address = apply_filters( 'the_content', $stockist_address);
$stockist_sites_html .= trim( preg_replace( '/\s+/', ' ', $stockist_address ) );
This worked like a charm for me.
I believe that usage of \s in regular expressions tabs, line breaks and carriage returns.