preg_replace

Hi Jason

Had a premier support session with Ray the other evening re the mod_rewrite stuff from the Poerstore webinar.

he helped set up the database to duplicate the title column entry to a permalink one and use pre_replace on it.

This is what I am using in the update record

<?php echo ((isset($_POST["NewsTitle"]))?preg_replace('/[^0-9a-z]/i','-',$_POST["NewsTitle"]):""); ?>

What that is doing is taking this sort of title

A sweet marketing idea!

and changing it to

A-sweet-marketing-idea-

Its taking any replaced characters (ie ! or . etc) and replacing them with -

How would I keep spaces replaced with a - but just remove the chars I dont want completely?

Thanks

Jamie

use str_replace to remove the special characters before the preg_replace replaces the slashes:
for example:

<?php echo ((isset($_POST["NewsTitle"]))?preg_replace('/[^0-9a-z]/i','-',str_replace(array("!","?","@"),"",$_POST["NewsTitle"])):""); ?>

Thanks Jason

Am seeming to not be able to include things like ", # and ' to be removed... do I need to wrap them in a certain way?

some character will need to be escaped, for example:
\"
\'

like this?

((isset($_POST["NewsTitle"]))?preg_replace('/[^0-9a-z]/i','-',str_replace(array("\"","\^","\[","\(","\)","\*","\+","\?","\\","\'","\.","\-","\!"),"",$_POST["NewsTitle"])):"")

yes, that looks right.

cheers

Hey Jason

Why would the articles that have a ? in them fail to show?

http://www.ybg.org.uk/blog.php

The permalink is being changed in the _update page in the backend like this (not sure if that helps any):

?preg_replace('/[^0-9a-z()!?,]/i','-',str_replace(array("@","\-","/",".","\"","_","\'","*","#"),"",$_POST["BlogTitle"])):"")

A question mark in a URL tells the server that anything after it is a URL variable.

for example:
results.php?var1=foo&var2=bar

the question mark tells the server that the information after it is variables, in this case a URL variable named var1 that has a value of foo and another named var2 that has a value of bar.

Ok, I get that... thanks

What if its part of a url friendly sentence, ie Credit control out of control? being converted to Credit-control-out-of-control? so that the resulting URL would be www.somedomain.com/blog/Credit-control-out-of-control?

If there is nothing after the ? .. why wouldnt that show?

Sorry, am not questioning you, am just looking to understand for my future ref.....