ereg_replace help please

[KSquared]

Hello

Im having trouble with this:

ereg_replace('[\]', "", $m_firstn); 

The $m_firstn var comes from a "First Name" field in a form.

I need to strip out any "," and " ' " before it is written to a confirm page
such as "John Doe, Jr" and any apostrophe's.

The reason Im stripping the "\" in the above is because I later get the the values from a db and anything with " ' " comes back "Lady\'s", so the above seems to take care of that, but Im not sure of the syntax to strip all of above mentioned characters.

Hope that makes sense.

Thanks in advance!

[Dan Grossman]

First, run your string through stripslashes() to remove the escaped quotes.

Then, you need to assign the results of ereg_replace to a variable, as it returns a string, it doesn't modify its arguments:

$m_firstn = stripslashes($m_firstn);
$m_firstn = eregi_replace(",", "", $m_firstn);
$m_firstn = eregi_replace("'", "", $m_firstn); 

Untested, but you should get the idea.

[KSquared]

ah ok, I thought there was a shorthand way to remove both chars in one line.

That works, Thanks!

[exam]

First, run your string through stripslashes() to remove the escaped quotes.

Then, you need to assign the results of ereg_replace to a variable, as it returns a string, it doesn't modify its arguments:

$m_firstn = stripslashes($m_firstn);
$m_firstn = eregi_replace(",", "", $m_firstn);
$m_firstn = eregi_replace("'", "", $m_firstn); 

Untested, but you should get the idea.

str_replace is a lot more efficient.

$m_firstn = str_replace(",", "", $m_firstn);

and if you need regular expressions, the preg ones are faster than the ereg ones.