PHP Regex to remove BBCode [URL='websirte']

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August 29th, 2011, 03:46 AM

mike224

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PHP Regex to remove BBCode [URL='websirte']

Hi there,

I'm quite new to regex and have been attempting to do this, but I'm not able to figure it out yet

Basically want to convert

PHP Code:


		
			
 a string [URL='anychars'] sometext

into

PHP Code:


		
			
 a string sometext

I've already choped out the [/URL] from the string, since I use it to count the number of links, and stick the result into an array:

PHP Code:


		
			
 $sigLinks= explode("[/URL]", $signature);      

        $numSigLinks = count($sigLinks);

now I'm trying to go through the sigLinks array and remove the remaining:

PHP Code:


		
			
[URL='whatever']

The PHP regex that I created (but doesnt work) was the following:

PHP Code:


		
			
 $str = preg_replace('/[\[URL=\':.\/\-\d\w?\'\]]/', "",  $sigLinks[$i]);

But this seemed to cut out the "sometext" string at the end

Idealy, I want to cut out the section

PHP Code:


		
			
[URL='[.*]'] // where .* is an char of any length

But I havent figured out how to do this yet

- Sorry, I'm still very new to regex and have been trying, but with very little success

August 29th, 2011, 06:25 AM

Kravvitz

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Dev Shed God 30th Plane (19500 - 19999 posts)

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Welcome to DevShed Forums, mike224.

1) You put your entire expression inside the brackets. That tells the engine to match the characters in any order, not just the order you want.

You only want the brackets around the characters that will appear between the single-quotes:

Code:

'/\[URL=\'[:.\/\-\d\w\?]\'\]/'

2) The question mark is a special character, so when it's not in a character class (the characters between the square brackets), it needs to be escaped with a backslash like the other special characters.

3) You need to also put a quantifier after the character class, because by itself the character class will only match a single character. In this case you may want to use the "+" which means to match 1 or more characters.

Code:

'/\[URL=\'[:\.\/\-\d\w\?&=]+\'\]/'

However, I would recommend using a negative character class instead, so you don't have to specify every character that might appear in a URL. The "^" as the first character in a character class indicates that any character not in the class will be matched, so we want to match any character that is not a single quote:

Code:

'/\[URL=\'[^\']+\'\]/'

Useful references:
http://www.php.net/manual/en/pcre.pattern.php
http://www.regular-expressions.info/reference.html

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PHP Regex to remove BBCode [URL='websirte']

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