Unable to remove white spaces and new lines in a string using php regex

Question

my string is

$str = '             4/151n';

My regex is

preg_match_all('/[^!$|@|!|#|%|\^|&|*|(|)|_|\–|\-|+|=|\\|\/|{|}|\[0-9\]|.|,|\|:|;|"|\'|\s+|→|<|>|\~\[\\r\\n\\t\]~]/', $str, $matches);

My output is

Array
(
    [0] => �
    [1] => n
)

The output I need is

Array
(
    [0] => n
)

Let me explain my requirement clearly. I need to remove all the special characters, numbers, new lines, white spaces from my string. The above regex is working fine for all cases except the above string.

For the above string, I am getting some unknown character in the 0th location. Need to remove that.

Please help me out!

Thanks in advance!

ThW · Accepted Answer · 2014-12-12 09:06:45Z

3

I need to remove all the special characters, numbers, new lines, white spaces

You can just use:

$str = preg_replace('/\P{L}+/u', '', $str);
//=> n

Here \P{L}+ matches 1 or more of non-letters with unicode support.

RegEx Demo

Update: Based on this comment from OP:

if I have multiple words in a string, I need to get them in an array

You can use:

if (preg_match_all('/\p{L}+/u', $str, $m))
    print_r($m[0]);

RegEx Demo 2

edited Dec 12, 2014 at 9:06

ThW

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answered Dec 12, 2014 at 7:19

anubhava

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9 Comments

GGGGG Over a year ago

I am getting 0 as my output for this, not getting n

anubhava Over a year ago

Works for me. What PHP version are you using? Try: $str = preg_replace('/\P{L}+/u', '', $str);

nu11p01n73R Over a year ago

@anubhava Just noticed that +1 :)

GGGGG Over a year ago

@anubhava if I have multiple words in a string, I need to get them in an array. For example, if my string is " 4/151abc!@#n", then my output should be array([0] => abc,[1] => n). For this, I need to use, preg_match_all, How can I write my regex for that. Hope you understand what I am saying!

GGGGG Over a year ago

@anubhava ,The final update is working fine for me, can you explain what is p{L} about this?

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