I have strings like +a +string +of +words +with +different +lengths
I want to use php's preg_replace to remove + only froms words that are 1 - 3 characters long including +. Required output is a +string of +words +with +different +lengths
Without capturing groups,
(?<= |^)\+(?=\w{1,3}\b)
Your final PHP code would be,
<?php
$string = '+a +string +of +words +with +different +lengths';
$pattern = "~(?<= |^)\+(?=\w{1,3}\b)~";
$replacement = "";
echo preg_replace($pattern, $replacement, $string);
?>
Output:
a +string of +words +with +different +lengths
Explanation:
(?<= |^)\+(?=\w{1,3}\b)
(?<= |^) Positive lookbehind to look only after the starting point or space.\+ A literal + sign(?=\w{1,3}\b) The characters following the + sign must be (1 to 3) word characters which is again followed by a boundary charaqcter.remove + only froms words that are 1 - 3 characters long including +
Try below regex using capturing groups and replace with $1
\+(\b\w{1,2}\b)
Here is demo on regex101
Description:
\b assert position at a word boundary
\w{1,2} match any word character [a-zA-Z0-9_] between 1 and 2 times
Pattern looks for + sign followed by 1 and 2 characters long word.
Note: If you are looking for only letters then use [a-z] instead of \w.
Sample code:
$re = "/\+(\b\w{1,2}\b)/";
$str = "+a +ab +string +of +words +with +different +lengths";
$subst = '$1';
$result = preg_replace($re, $subst, $str);
output:
a ab +string of +words +with +different +lengths
Use this:
$replaced = preg_replace('~\+(?=\w{1,2}\b)~', '', $yourstring);
Explanation
\+ match a literal +(?=\w{1,2}\b) asserts that what follows are one or two word characters then a word boundaryThe {1,2} is because you want to target strings of 3 chars at the most including the +