Re: ereg_replace help

On Tue, Nov 18, 2003 at 04:37:52PM +1100, Martin Towell wrote: : : I have an array of strings in the following format: : "abcd - rst" : "abcd - uvw" : "abcd - xyz" : "foobar - rst" : "blah - rst" : "googol - uvw" : : What I want to do is strip everything from the " - " bit of the string to : the end, _but_ only for the strings that don't start with "abcd" : : I was thinking something like the following: : echo ereg_replace("(!abcd) - xyz", "\\1", $str)."\n"; : but obviously this doesn't work, otherwise I wouldn't be emailing the : list... You can't use "!" because it's not a valid special character in regular expressions. It's really hard to craft do-not-match-this-word patterns. You're better off separating the two pieces of logic. $arr = array( "abcd - rst", "abcd - uvw", "abcd - xyz", "foobar - rst", "blah - rst", "googol - uvw" ); reset($arr); while (list($key, $value) = each($arr)) { if (substr($value, 0, 5) != 'abcd ') { $arr[$key] = ereg_replace('^(.*) - .*$', '\1', $value); } } print_r($arr);