[TriLUG] [hopefully] quickie help with a regex

wejii wejii at bellsouth.net
Tue Aug 10 17:58:53 EDT 2010


This seems to work for ascii letters, digits, and whitespace -

   preg_match_all('/\'[a-zA-Z0-9\s]*\'/', $input, $result);

Other characters like &, $, @, ... may be included if you want. 
I am uncomfortable using the dot "." feature for several reasons. Here is one:

>From O'Reilly's "Regular Expression Cookbook"

"Dot abuse
The dot is the most abused regular expression feature. ‹\d\d. \d\d. \d\d› is not a good
way to match a date. It does match 05/16/08 just fine, but it also matches 99/99/99.
Worse, it matches 12345678."

I hope this is helpful.

Walt




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