Ah, i seem to have figured out the problem here... if you run a
preg_match_all it will return
[0] => Array
(
[0] => And the cow says
[1] =>
[2] => Moo"
[3] =>
)
And preg_replace is global by default, so in order for this to work
correctly, not sure about the elegantly part, but you can just limit
preg_replace
preg_replace('/(?:(?!"[a-zA-Z\s]*").)*/', '', $str, 1);
and that seems to work correctly...
Neat... kinda...
On Thu, Nov 4, 2010 at 3:47 PM, Alex Nikitin <niksoft@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I'm kind of new to this list, and so if there have been discussions about
> this, i am not quite aware of them (i tried searching), but i ran across
> this issue and i figured it would be interesting enough to show you guys
> here:
>
> I was looking for a way to replace all the text in a string that doesn't
> match a pattern with nothing (therefore string in, only part of the string
> that matches my pattern out), one line with no arrays in the middle; and i
> guess there is a way to do this with temp variables, well i know there is,
> but i kind of wanted a more elegant solution, so i came up with this match
> line
>
> $str = 'And the cow says "Mooo"';
> preg_match('/(?:(?!"[a-zA-Z\s]*").)*/', $str, $matches);
> print_r($matches);
>
> output:
> Array
> (
> [0] => And the cow says
> )
>
> so i was pretty happy to see that, so if i pass that expression to
> preg_replace it should, hopefully, replace that text with nothing, and i
> theoretically should be left with "Mooo", which was my goal originally, so i
> run
>
> print_r(preg_replace('/(?:(?!"[a-zA-Z\s]*").)*/', '', $str));
>
> output:
> "
>
> ... Hardly what i was expecting... Any ideas? bug, something i'm not
> getting, something in the way preg works?
>
> Thanks in advance,
>
>
>
> ~ Alex
>
