I'am doing a project which is cleaning text with php. say that i have string like this :
$string = 'Life is like. . . . . . a box of chocolate. . . . . '; //each dot separated by space
How can i get the output like
$string ='Life is like a box of chocolate';
You can use preg_replace
$string = 'Life is like. . . . . . a box of chocolate. . . . . ';
echo preg_replace('/[.,]/', '', $string);
isn't it an easy str_replace()?
str_replace(". ", "", $text);
If your expected result is just to strip the dots and surrounding spaces, you can use preg_replace, but to get your expected result you need a bit more complex regex:
echo preg_replace(array("/(?<!\w) *\. */", "/(?<=\w)\. */"), array("", " "), $string);
Here I use an array of two regex to match two different cases:
\w in regex means a letter or a digit, and this is a negative lookbehind). This is substituted by an empty string.2 is to match and remove the dot in 'like. ' but leave a single space after the word.
This gives your expected result: 'Life is like a box of chocolate'
You can learn more on regex (short for regular expression) looking for tutorials on the web.