Re: Is there a faster way to escape special characters in a regex?

On Tue, 2002-03-12 at 05:57, Richard Davey wrote: > Hi all, > > At the moment I'm doing this to escape all "special" regular expression > characters from my regex string: Sounds like you want preg_quote(): http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.preg-quote.php Hope this helps, Torben > $badwordtest = str_replace("/","",$badwordtest); > $badwordtest = str_replace("\\","",$badwordtest); > $badwordtest = str_replace("^","\^",$badwordtest); > $badwordtest = str_replace(".","\.",$badwordtest); > $badwordtest = str_replace("[","\[",$badwordtest); > $badwordtest = str_replace("$","\$",$badwordtest); > $badwordtest = str_replace("(","\(",$badwordtest); > $badwordtest = str_replace(")","\)",$badwordtest); > $badwordtest = str_replace("|","\|",$badwordtest); > $badwordtest = str_replace("*","\*",$badwordtest); > $badwordtest = str_replace("+","\+",$badwordtest); > $badwordtest = str_replace("?","\?",$badwordtest); > $badwordtest = str_replace("{","\{",$badwordtest); > $badwordtest = str_replace("}","\}",$badwordtest); > $badwordtest = str_replace("\\","\\",$badwordtest); > $badwordtest = "/" . $badwordtest . "/i"; > > if (preg_match($badwordtest,$word)) { > $directmatch = TRUE; > } > > Is there a way to either do this all in one go or even better, have the ereg > itself ignore those characters if they are contained in the string? The idea > is that I want to check a word for swearing by doing a direct comparison > with a list of swear words, however the word I check could easily contain a > special character so I need to escape it before the test commences. > > Suggestions very welcome! > > Cheers, > > Richard > -- > Fatal Design > http://www.fatal-design.com > Atari / DarkBASIC / Coding / Since 1995 -- Torben Wilson <torben@php.net> http://www.thebuttlesschaps.com http://www.hybrid17.com http://www.inflatableeye.com +1.604.709.0506