Need help editing a text variable...

[wfernley]

Hi everyone,

I need some help with editing a text variable. Basically I have a variable:

$text = "[color=blue:fd2fa54b07]Hi everyone![/color:fd2fa54b07] more text goes here...";

What I need is the variable to not print the text in the []'s. Is there a way I can edit the text variable to take out the [] tags? The values will be different everytime so thats where it gets tough. So I was thinking is there a way I can make a script that will examine every character and look for a [ and when its found it will delete the [ as well as every character until it hits the ] and then deletes that character. So if I had a line saying "[color=blue:fd2fa54b07]Hi everyone![/color:fd2fa54b07]" It would delete the "[color=blue:fd2fa54b07]" and keep the "Hi everyone!" and then delete the "[/color:fd2fa54b07]".

Is there a way I can do this?

Thanks for your help :)

Wes

[jamie]

hi wes,

the more your work with php the more you'll find you need to know regular expressions. it is really time well spent! google for regular expressions or visit a site like sitepoint or devshed, they'll have lots of tutorials.

in your case you would need the ^ operator. ^] means any character except ]

hope that helps

[wfernley]

Hi Jamie,

thanks for the reply.

I am still a bit confused with what I should look for. Where would I use the ^ character? I need to take out the text between the [ and ] also.

Is there a special variable that will do this?

thanks again! :)

Wes

[gliff]

Regular Expresions are a way of defining complex text patterns, such as "the first 10 occurrences of the letter a" or "all the text in-between brackets". If you're going to be doing any kind of PHP Programming in the future you ought to spend some time reading up on them.

The preg_replace function is just like the str_replace function, except it uses regular expresions. The following line should do what you want.

$text = preg_replace('/\[.+?\]/','',$text);

[wfernley]

Thanks Gliff.

Yeah I was unclear of what regular expressions are. I know I have used them before but it was mostly for basic functions.

I will have to read up on them though.

Thanks again!

Wes