Regular expression for finding multiple patterns from a given string - php

Question

I am using regular expression for getting multiple patterns from a given string.
Here, I will explain you clearly.
$string = "about us";
$newtag = preg_replace("/ /", "_", $string);
print_r($newtag);
The above is my code.
Here, i am finding the space in a word and replacing the space with the special character what ever i need, right??
Now, I need a regular expression that gives me patterns like
about_us, about-us, aboutus as output if i give about us as input.
Is this possible to do.
Please help me in that.
Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

And finally, my answer is
$string = "contact_us";
$a = array('-','_',' ');
foreach($a as $b){
if(strpos($string,$b)){
$separators = array('-','_','',' ');
$outputs = array();
foreach ($separators as $sep) {
$outputs[] = preg_replace("/".$b."/", $sep, $string);
}
print_r($outputs);
}
}
exit;

Answer 2

You need to do a loop to handle multiple possible outputs :
$separators = array('-','_','');
$string = "about us";
$outputs = array();
foreach ($separators as $sep) {
$outputs[] = preg_replace("/ /", $sep, $string);
}
print_r($outputs);

Answer 3

You can try without regex:
$string = 'about us';
$specialChar = '-'; // or any other
$newtag = implode($specialChar, explode(' ', $string));
If you put special characters into an array:
$specialChars = array('_', '-', '');
$newtags = array();
foreach ($specialChars as $specialChar) {
$newtags[] = implode($specialChar, explode(' ', $string));
}
Also you can use just str_replace()
foreach ($specialChars as $specialChar) {
$newtags[] = str_replace(' ', $specialChar, $string);
}

Answer 4

Not knowing exactly what you want to do I expect that you might want to replace any occurrence of a non-word (1 or more times) with a single dash.
e.g.
preg_replace('/\W+/', '-', $string);

Answer 5

If you just want to replace the space, use \s
<?php
$string = "about us";
$replacewith = "_";
$newtag = preg_replace("/\s/", $replacewith, $string);
print_r($newtag);
?>

Answer 6

I am not sure that regexes are the good tool for that. However you can simply define this kind of function:
function rep($str) {
return array( strtr($str, ' ', '_'),
strtr($str, ' ', '-'),
str_replace(' ', '', $str) );
}
$result = rep('about us');
print_r($result);

Answer 7

Matches any character that is not a word character
$string = "about us";
$newtag = preg_replace("/(\W)/g", "_", $string);
print_r($newtag);
in case its just that... you would get problems if it's a longer string :)