> I think a regex would be most appropriate here: > > <?php > > $my_string = "mmm444"; > > $my_integer = intval(eregi_replace("[a-z]", "", $my_string)); > > print $my_integer; > > ?> > > This removes all letters and takes the int value. In perl you can remove > everything that's NOT a digit but I didn't figure that out in PHP yet... this > should do for now. you're thinking of something like: $my_integer = intval(preg_replace('!\D+!', '', $my_string)); aren't you? PCRE regular expression finctions are PERL compatible reg. functions using PCRE library.