note 50880 added to function.preg-match

How to strip non-alphabetic characters from the beginning and/or end of a string? Let's say I receive a "chat" sentence "Hello, everybody, how's it going? :-)" I explode it by spaces into an array of strings, and then I would like to clean the words as much as possible of anything non-alphabetic: Hello, --> Hello everybody --> everybody going? --> going :-) --> [empty] I could live with "how's", but "hello," is causing me some problems. Any idea? Thanks in advance ---- Manual Page -- http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.preg-match.php Edit -- http://master.php.net/manage/user-notes.php?action=edit+50880 Delete: added to the manual -- http://master.php.net/manage/user-notes.php?action=delete+50880&report=yes&reason=added+to+the+manual Delete: bad code -- http://master.php.net/manage/user-notes.php?action=delete+50880&report=yes&reason=bad+code Delete: spam -- http://master.php.net/manage/user-notes.php?action=delete+50880&report=yes&reason=spam Delete: useless -- http://master.php.net/manage/user-notes.php?action=delete+50880&report=yes&reason=useless Delete: other reasons -- http://master.php.net/manage/user-notes.php?action=delete+50880&report=yes Reject -- http://master.php.net/manage/user-notes.php?action=reject+50880&report=yes Search -- http://master.php.net/manage/user-notes.php