Search and remove from content?

0
votes

I have this content "Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet,[Hello world] consectetur adipiscing elit. Mauris ornare luctus diam sit amet mollis."
I want to remove any thing wrap by []
so the result of this content should be removed [Hello world]
Like this

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Mauris ornare luctus diam sit amet mollis.

2
php
$output = preg_replace('#\[.+?\]#s', '', $input). – DCoder
look up preg_replace php.net/manual/en/function.preg-replace.php – anson

2 Answers

4
votes

Use preg_replace:

$string = 'Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet,[Hello world] consectetur adipiscing elit. Mauris ornare luctus diam sit amet mollis.';
$newString = preg_replace('/\[.+?\]/', '', $string);
echo $newString;

Codepad Example

0
votes

preg_replace is the way to go. It uses a regular expression to match a pattern in your input string (third parameter) and returns a string that replaces anything that matches the pattern (first parameter) with your replacement string (second parameter).

$input = "Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet,[Hello world] consectetur adipiscing elit. Mauris ornare luctus diam sit amet mollis.";
$output = preg_replace('/\[.+\]/', '', $input);
echo $output;

Will give you:

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Mauris ornare luctus diam sit amet mollis.
  • An important thing to realize in this case is that you need to use a \ to escape the [ and ] characters because they have special meaning in regular expressions. The Wikipedia entry on regular expressions has a section that goes over the syntax and covers other metacharacters.

  • Another consideration is that you should use + for nongreedy matching instead of * because if your input is:

    $input = "Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet,[Hello world] consectetur [test] adipiscing elit. Mauris ornare luctus diam sit amet mollis.";

    then your output will remove consectetur which you probably don't want and give you:

    Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, adipiscing elit. Mauris ornare luctus diam sit amet mollis.