Converting M-U-C-K to muck, but not

PHP
1

I am trying to catch when people spell out bad words like “M-U-C-K” instead of “MUCK”…

My initial solution was to do this…

    $string = 'M-U-C-K you!!';
    $string2 = str_replace('-', '', $string);

From there, my dirty word function would know how to handle “MUCK”.

However, if someone types this…

I really like lemon-lime soda with my hamburger

…then it collapse “lemon-lime” to “lemonlime” which is not what I want!

I would like to tell PHP or Regex the following:

If you see a word where there is more than one hyphen in the series then do as I did above.  But if you just find one hyphen, then assume the word is okay.

Of course, that wouldn’t help with “sweet-n-sour” or “Rock-N-Roll”, but one step at a time!! :smile:

2

Hi Mikey!

The PHP function you’re looking for is preg_replace (http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.preg-replace.php) where you will set the pattern as ‘-[a-zA-Z]±)’ which will then search for - followed by any letters - or use \w+ rather than my [a-zA-Z]+ then another -. Don’t forget to use the $1 for the atom (the letters in the middle) captured by this regex. Because M-U-C-K may be M - U - C - K, you may want to use optional space characters (\s?) around the hyphens.

As for your sweet-n-sour, the pattern there is a single character in the middle but multiple characters on the outside of the -n- so you could use ‘(\w\w+)\s?-\s?(\w+)\s?-\s?(\w\w+)’ to cover this case, too.

Recommendation: Friedl’s Mastering Regular Expressions is the master treatise on regular expressions and well worth the cost (O’Reilly).

Regards,

DK

3

Why not adopt the same approach as SitePoint and give readers the power to flag posts?

4

@dklynn,

After looking at your post, it got my Regex mojo going!

This seems to work pretty well for the particular problem I described…

<?php
    $orig = 'm-u-c-k MUCK W-u-S-s-Y sweet-n-sour D-A-M-N Rock-N-Roll Frick holyc-r-a-p  Beverly Hills 9-0-2-1-0';

    $patterns = array();
    $patterns[0] = '~\b\w(-\w)+(s?)\b~i';

    $replacements = array();
    $replacements[0] = '****';

    $new = preg_replace($patterns, $replacements, $orig);

    echo "<p><b>ORIG:</b>&nbsp; $orig</p>";
    echo "<p><b>NEW:</b>&nbsp; $new</p>";
?>

Here is the output…

What do you think?

5

I do have that feature, but also want an extra line of defense in case someone starts dropping F-BOMBS!! :open_mouth:

6

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