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Using PHP and Regular Expressions to Tidy Up Variables |
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I recently had to develop a very simple email manager for a client. It was necessary to extract some text from a database and then to insert that text into an email message, which was then fired off to a mailing list. The problem I had was that the text contained HTML tags as well as other HTML characters (for example, ), and I only wanted plain text in the email. I was able to use the PHP strip_tags function to remove the HTML tags (see below), but this still left me with several HTML characters in the text. The use of a regular expression solved the problem. Here is the bit of code I used to clean up the contents of the variable: // Get rid of HTML tags When I extracted the piece of text from the database I placed it in a variable called $contents. I then ran the PHP strip_tags function on the variable to get rid of the HTML tags. Next we have the bit of code that includes the regular expression. $pattern contains the HTML character we want to search for. Here, $pattern contains , which is the HTML character for a non-breaking space. I needed to get rid of this and replace it with a normal space because it looked a bit strange in the email message. For example, I needed to change: 'thisnbsp;week'snbsp;specialnbsp;offernbsp;is...' to: 'this week's special offer is...' $replacement contains a blank space, which is what I want to replace with. The last line in the bit of code is the actual regular expression. Author: John Dixon Go back to PHP Tutorials home page Go back to Tutorials home page
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