On Wed, Aug 13, 2003 at 02:48:11PM -0400, Herhuth, Ron wrote: > I have an array of a submitted text string (called $submittedTextString). > And I have an array of common words (called $commonWordArray). > > I'm trying to use Regex to: These aren't necessarily regex problems. > 1. Remove any words from $submittedTextString that appear in > $commonWordArray (about a hundred words). My suggestion is to use split() or explode() to split $submittedTextString and put the words in an array. Then use array_intersection() to return an array of words in both arrays. Then you could either loop through the intersection array and use str_replace() to replace each word with the empty string, or you convert the intersection array to an array that maps each word in the array to the empty string, and use that as the map argument for strtr() > 2. Remove any numbers from $submittedTextString. The brute force method is to loop through 0-9, using str_replace() to replace each digit with the emplty string, whether the digit exists or not. Another approach is the search for numbers first, and use str_replace() only if you find something. str_replace() has to do a search anyway, so a seperate search is probably redundant, meaning the brute force method is probably faster. If your numbers may include non-numeric characters (e.g. decimal points), use [0-9]*[.]?[0-9]+([.][0-9]+)?, or something similar, in ereg() to return the number, and pass it to str_replace() to replace with the empty string. > 3. Remove any characters from $submittedTextString that aren't > alphabetical. Try searching for [^a-zA-Z] and apply str_replace() to anything you find. For non-English alphabets you may need to alter that, e.g. [^a-åA-Å]. I've only tried PHP regex with English, so I don't know. > 4. Remove any duplicate words from $submittedTextString Use split() or explode(), sort the resulting array with asort() so you don't change the indices, and delete any element of the array that matches the element immediately before. You should be able to do this with either a loop or with array_walk(). Resort the remaining elements with ksort() to put them back in their original order, and use join() or implode() to convert the array back to a string. I haven't tried writing any code, so you'll have to figure out the details yourself. Bob Hall -- PHP Windows Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
