Combine preg _replace and strtolower

Question

I try to combine strtolower and preg_replace, but I am not sure how to nest it. I have tried it like so:

$res = strtolower(preg_replace("/[^a-zA-Z]/", "", $string));

I found this solution but cannot get it to work. I want a lowercase string without special characters:

I am some special-content

turns into

iamsomespecialcontent

How can I achieve this and store it inside $res?

Whichever function is nested the deepest will occur first. In this case as your code is now, the `preg_replace` happens first, then `preg_replace`'s output is converted to lower, and output to `$res`. — Andrew Coder, Oct 22 '15 at 17:34
I do not know why the code above does not work, but I solved it using two lines: `$string = strtolower(get_sub_field('a-pikto')); $res = preg_replace("/[^a-zA-Z]/", "", $string);`… — Marian Rick, Oct 22 '15 at 17:37

score 1 · Answer 1 · edited May 23 '17 at 11:59

1

Well I can say first step will be making string as lowercase

$rest = strtolower($string);

And then removing white spaces

$rest = preg_replace("/\s+/", "", $rest);

You can combine it as -

$rest = preg_replace("/\s+/", "", strtolower($rest));

For more special character related solution you can try this

edited May 23 '17 at 11:59

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answered Oct 22 '15 at 17:42

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This is not stripping the special chars, just the spaces. There is no function lowercase - http://php.net/manual-lookup.php?pattern=lowercase – Jens A. Koch Oct 22 '15 at 17:43

score 1 · Accepted Answer · answered Oct 22 '15 at 17:44

Its better to split this into a two-liner and debug the output of the commands with var_dump() in order to see whats going on:

<?php

/* string with special chars */
$string = 'abczABCZ-#+´!"§123';

$no_special_chars = preg_replace("/[^a-zA-Z]/", "", $string); 

var_dump($no_special_chars);    // string 'abczABCZ' (length=8)   

$lowercased = strtolower($no_special_chars);

var_dump($lowercased);          // string 'abczabcz' (length=8)

And maybe you noticed, that you don't have to handle A-Z in the preg_replace(), if you lowercase the string first.

$res = preg_replace("/[^a-z]/", "", strtolower($string));

var_dump($res); // string 'abczabcz' (length=8)

You could also pass `i` modifier to preg_replace code: `preg_replace('/[^a-z]/i', '', $string); ` — jpaljasma, Oct 22 '15 at 18:03

Combine preg _replace and strtolower

2 Answers2