preg_replace in PHP

Question

$content = preg_replace('%^\s*<ul>(.+)</ul>\s*$%sim', '\1', $menulist);

What is the meaning of first argument in the above function?

If I print $content I get the following categories as below:

Business

Accounting

Accounting For Leasing

Acqusition Disposition

Balance Sheet And Cash Flows

and so on....

Now Business is main category and Accounting is its subcategoy. Now I want to store them in array. How can I do that?

score 0 · Answer 1 · answered May 18 '11 at 09:06

0

http://php.net/manual/en/function.preg-replace.php

from above:

The pattern to search for. It can be either a string or an array with strings.

answered May 18 '11 at 09:06

stecb

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I'm not able to understand the argument in given function. $menulist is the array of words. – fawad May 18 '11 at 09:07
The first argument is a regular expression (WHAT you want to search inside the array of strings $menulist), the second one is what you will replace when a pattern will be found, the third one is the subject (string or array of strings where to serach/replace) – stecb May 18 '11 at 09:12
you should explode (http://php.net/manual/en/function.explode.php) the $content ;) ..i.e. $myArrayOfCategories = explode(' ',$content) – stecb May 18 '11 at 09:28
If i print using "htmlspecialchars" then I see the following output:
- Business
  
  Accounting
  
  Accounting For Leasing
  
  Acqusition Disposition
  .... How can i use explode now ?
– fawad May 18 '11 at 09:40

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered May 18 '11 at 09:08

0

The first argument is regular expression, it's a sort of language for string matching. It's widely used in the programming world and supported by most languages like PHP, JavaScript, Python and many more. You can find out more about regular expression here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regular_expression and read up one the function preg_replace() here: http://php.net/manual/en/function.preg-replace.php

answered May 18 '11 at 09:08

Karl Laurentius Roos

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You totally changed your question, you asked what the first argument for `preg_replace()` was and an explanation for it. Now you asking something totally else. – Karl Laurentius Roos May 18 '11 at 11:05

score 0 · Answer 3 · answered May 18 '11 at 09:09

0

It Performs a regular expression search against a content and replace the matched string with the given replace string.

<?php
$string = 'April 15, 2003';
$pattern = '/(\w+) (\d+), (\d+)/i';
$replacement = '${1}1,$3';
echo preg_replace($pattern, $replacement, $string);
?>

The above example will output:

April1,2003

Read more about this on http://php.net/manual/en/function.preg-replace.php

answered May 18 '11 at 09:09

Vijay

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If I print $content I get the following categories as below: Business Accounting Accounting For Leasing Acqusition Disposition Balance Sheet And Cash Flows and so on.... – fawad May 18 '11 at 09:12