Strip everything between the ( and ) characters

[Yokhannan]

Hey All,

Would like to get:

This is a pretty cool line of text!

from:

This is a (sweet) pretty cool line (string) of text!

So, basically rip out the ( and the ) and anything between then.

Thanks!

[samanime]

Something like this should work:

while(($loc = strpos('(', $text)) !== false) {
    if(($end_loc = strpos(')', $text)) === false)
      break;

    $text = substr($text, 0, $loc) . substr($text, $endloc);
}

That is a basic method. If you notice I put an if in there which says that if we don't have a ), we're gonna stop looping. You may want to tweak that to act depending how you want to handle that.

There is also a regex method of doing this, but I'm not a regex pro so I'll let logic_earth or someone else fill you in on that method. =3

Hope this helps.

[crmalibu]

$new = preg_replace('#\([^)]*\)#', '', $text); 

Will strip even if the opening ( and closing ) aren't on the same line. It will strip unlimited text in between.

[Yokhannan]

Sweet, thanks crmalibu!

[Salathe]

You'll have to watch out for nested pairs of parentheses. If you can wrap your head around it, a recursive pattern might come to the rescue.

\(               # opening parenthesis
    (?:          # followed by
        [^()]++  # one or more non-parenthesis characters (double plus)
        |        # or
        (?R)     # a nested parenthesis pair
    )*           # zero or more times (zero for empty parenthesis pairs)
\)               # closing parenthesis

In PHP that would be something like:

$text = 'This is (a) test ()of (nested (roundy) brackets) smileys :)';
echo preg_replace('/\((?:[^()]++|(?R))*\)/', '', $text); 

[janniesekind]

try javascript