How can I get rid of extra hyphens at the end and beginning of user submitted text for example. I want visual-studio-2008 instead of -visual-studio-2008- is there a way I can remove the extra hyphens using PHP?
Just use trim and supply all characters you want to strip as the second parameter. In your case:
// Yields visual-studio-2008
$string = trim('-visual-studio-2008-' ,'-');
use trim(field,'-')
Use trim and have the second argument be a '-' character. That will remove the hyphens from the beginning and end of the string.
i.e. trim($string, '-')
For more: http://us3.php.net/trim