Remove Single Quotes (Regex)

[DigitalBurn]

Hello,

I'd like to know if there's a regular expression that will remove single quotes but keep them if they're surrounded by letters. Basically I'd like to turn this:

'Tom's awesome pot roast'

into

Tom's awesome pot roast

Any idea how I would do that? I tried

[\b'\b] 

but that replaces all single quotes. Thanks.

[Jake Arkinstall]

How about this:

preg_replace("/([^a-z])'(.*)'([^\s])/", '$1$2$3', "this is 'Tom's awesome pot roast'!"); 

It removes pairs of quotes which aren't in situations that they could be abbreviations.

[Salathe]

I'd like to know if there's a regular expression that will remove single quotes but keep them if they're surrounded by letters.

I'm not sure if you're willing to delve into slightly more complex regular expressions but it's possible to write one which looks, in no uncertain terms, for the scenario you want: To remove single quotes only if they aren't surrounded by letters. One way of doing it would be to use the lookahead and lookbehind assertions to take a peek at what is surrounding the single quote character.

The pattern: /'(?!(?<=[a-z]')(?=[a-z]))/i

Translated to plain(ish) English: Match a single quote which is not: a) preceded by a letter and b) followed by a letter.

Using that pattern, the $replacement value (2nd argument to preg_replace) could then just be an empty string "" as it should only ever match those quotes that you want to remove.