[UPHPU] Regex help.

[Ash]

Kyle Waters wrote:
> Ash wrote:
>> I have a database that has addresses in it. The only characters 
>> allowed are A-z 0-9 and ,()':.
>>
>> The database also has other characters in it, but I want to delete all 
>> the characters that are not allowed (because they crash my program 
>> that prints the addresses to the printer.)
>>
>> It's just a text file, so I could run sed on it, but how do you test 
>> for just those characters?
>>
> So if I understand you have a text file and you want to remove all 
> characters that are not A-Z a-z ,()':.
> I would do the following:
> 
> $contents=file_get_contents("file.txt");
> 
> preg_replace('[^A-Za-z\,\(\)\'\:\.]','',$contents);
> 
> file_put_contents("file.txt",$contents);
> 
> 
> 
> That will remove all other characters from the file. (Though you should 
> wait until someone else posts and fixes my regex).
> 
> Kyle
> 

Thanks for the point in the right direction at least. I can't get it to
work yet, but I'm reading up on preg_replace and am trying a bunch of
different things. Here's my CLI script as it stands right now (I took
out everything except A-Z to make sure there wasn't something weird with
the other characters going on.):

#!/usr/bin/php -q

<?PHP

$contents=file_get_contents("file.txt");

preg_replace('^A-Za-z','',$contents);

file_put_contents("file.txt",$contents);

?>



The timestamp on file.txt changes, but the text in it stays the same.

Ash