[Skidzy McFergus]

Hi, i was wondering if there was a php function that removes all punctuation from a string of text. I can filter out full stops, commas etc using regex but thought surely there must be a function to do all punctuation. Have looked through the manual but could find anything.

[MikeMackay]

What about building a regexp that only allows [a-z][0-9] and spaces (if you want spaces allowed). Get it to delete everything else from the string, that should take care of removing absolutely everything.

Be careful with it though.

- Mike

[xml]

Skidzy McFergus,
Do you anticipate unicode characters in the string?

If so try this:
$cleanUnicodeStr = trim(preg_replace('#[^\p{L}\p{N}]+#u', ' ', $unicodeStr));

This will also clean up shitty unicode punctuation like those smily faces, musical quotations and stars etc, whilst at the same time allow for Japanese symbols and other such characters.

[smallbeer]

or

$text = preg_replace('/\W/', ' ', $text);

[xml]

Does that support unicode smallbeer?

[smallbeer]

I'm not exactly sure what you mean by support, but I guess you'd want to use a function that supports multibyte characters.

http://uk2.php.net/mb_ereg_replace

[xml]

preg_replace supports unicode, by using the "u" modifier.

Without setting the "u" unicode modifier the string will be interpreted as a string of bytes and will not recognise multibyte unicode characters as individual items to be matched. Obviously cutting part way thru a multibyte character will fuck up the string royally causing a few heart aches on a internationalised application.

[Skidzy McFergus]

thanks for all that, will process in due course.