note 50880 rejected from function.preg-match by nlopess

Note Submitter: alcator at seznam dot cz ---- 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