Re: preg_replace question

On 12-12-2012 21:10, Curtis Maurand wrote:

On 12/12/2012 12:00 PM, Maciek Sokolewicz wrote:

On 12-12-2012 17:11, Curtis Maurand wrote:

I have several poisoned .js files on a server. I can use find to recursively find them and then use preg_replace to replace the string. However the string is filled with single quotes, semi-colons and a lot of other special characters. Will preg_relace(escapeshellarg($String),$replacement) work or do I need to go through the entire string and escape what needs to be escaped? --C

First of all, why do you want to use preg_replace when you're not actually using regular expressions??? Use str_replace or stri_replace instead. Aside from that, escapeshellarg() escapes strings for use in shell execution. Perl Regexps are not shell commands. It's like using mysqli_real_escape_string() to escape arguments for URLs. That doesn't compute, just like your way doesn't either. If you DO wish to escape arguments for a regular expression, use preg_quote instead, that's what it's there for. But first, reconsider using preg_replace, since I honestly don't think you need it at all if the way you've posted (preg_replace(escapeshellarg($string),$replacement)) is the way you want to use it.

Thanks for your response. I'm open to to using str_replace. no issue there. my main question was how to properly get a string of javascript into a string that could then be processed. I'm not sure I can just put

that in quotes and have it work.    There are colons, "<",">",

semicolons, and doublequotes. Do I just need to rifle through the string and escape the reserved characters or is there a function for that? --C

Why do you want to escape them? There are no reserved characters in the case of str_replace. You don't have to put anything in quotes. For example: $string = 'This is a <string with various supposedly "reserved" ``\\ _- characters' echo str_replace('supposedly', 'imaginary', $string) would return: This is a <string with imaginary "reserved" ``\\- characters So... why do you want to "escape" these characters?