Remove unwanted characters in a string

Question

I would like to ask how to remove a special character from a string(extracted from a scrapped page).

 4:30am

I just want to get the time so ive tried so filter it using this:

$str = 'Â 4:30am';
$new_string = preg_replace("[^A-Za-z0-9]", "", $str); 
echo '<pre>'.$new_string.'</pre>';

But it doesn't change :| Is there any solution/approach?

Solution 1

Your regex is invalid...

$str = 'Â 4:30am';
$new_string = preg_replace("~[^a-z0-9:]~i", "", $str); 
echo '<pre>'.$new_string.'</pre>';

... and you forgot ":" in the regex, so in your case it will be removed.

Solution 2

Your regex pattern needs to be enclosed by delimiters. Your current pattern is using the [ and ] as the delimiters, which most likely isn't what you intended to do.

preg_replace("/[^A-Za-z0-9]/", "", $str); 

http://pl.php.net/manual/en/regexp.reference.delimiters.php

Solution 3

You can use filter_var

$str = 'Â 4:30am';
$str = filter_var($str,FILTER_SANITIZE_STRING,FILTER_FLAG_STRIP_HIGH);
echo $str ;

Output

4:30am

Solution 4

Use $new_string = preg_replace("/[^A-Za-z0-9]/", "", $str); should fix it.

The first parameter of preg_replace is the pattern, which is required to be surrounded by something like / or @.

In your case, you're using the pattern [^A-Za-z0-9] where [ and ] are treated as pattern delimiters. So the actual pattern being matched becomes ^A-Za-z0-9, which matches nothing in the input.

Solution 5

To get the time:

$str = 'Â 4:30am';
$time = preg_match('/(?P<time>\d?\d:\d\d(?:am|pm))/', $str, $match);
var_dump($match);

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Comments

[dev-null-dweller]

It was enclosed in delimiters :) See third example from linked manual and sentence above it.