Geting rid of ???????????

[ChilliBoy]

Hi,

I'm having a few problems on working out how to do this. (PHP)

My script gets passed a search varaible which is typed in by the user.

The script returns something like;

books+cars+hotrods

This then needs to be converted to a variable I can uses as a file reference - which can be done by str_replace ("+","/" $variable);

however: I can't work out how to change the incoming variable to the correct format if the input is something like:

+books++++++cars+++hotrods++

Anyone know how I can always convert something like the above to:

books/cars/hotrods

Cheers!!














<Edited by ChilliBoy on 01-12-2001 at 08:18 AM>

[PeterW]

This would be my method, it works fine, but I dont know efficient doing a reg exp grep is..

$something = explode( "+", $something);
$something = preg_grep ("/[^\+]/", $something);
$something = implode ("/", $something);

This will return a string with "books/cars/hotrods" in..

Hope this helps.. if not Freddy will probably give you a pointer to the right direction

[ChilliBoy]

Hi,

Thanks for the help. Not that I'm averse to your idea, but is there no way of doing it without calling a regex?

I don't know how much calling one regex would slow things down (not much I suppose) but on the face of it, it would seem like a very simple operation which could be done without it.

Its just that I need the script to execute as fast a possible, and I'm therefore looking to cut anything out that may slow things down - however slightly.

[PeterW]

I am not sure if there is a non regexp grep in php, but you could do something like..

$something = explode( "+", $something);
while( list($key, $val) = each($something)) {
if ($val) { $newarray[] = $val; }
}
$something = implode ("/", $newarray);

This would get rid of the regexp, but like you say, it does seem like a lot of code to do something fairly simple. Perhaps someone can unearth a nice PHP function by magic

[ChilliBoy]

May have to delve into the PHP manual. I'd have thought there would be a built in function somewhere, as I guess this is a pretty common need for forms etc.

Maybe it a combination of two functions which need to be spotted?

[freddydoesphp]

I like this way

$str = "+books++++++cars+++hotrods++";
$str = implode("/", array_unique(explode("+", $str)));


will give you

/books/cars/hotrods

[ChilliBoy]

cheers Freddy - nice and tidy solution!