How to remove a character that is not a letter in a string?

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3

I have a array of strings who returns to me as follows:

Array
(
    [0] => motivação,
    [1] => sentimento33
    [2] => que..
    [3] => 56nos
    [4] => impulsiona\\
    [5] => proporciona
    [6] => investir^^
    [7] => determinado
    [8] => grau?
    [9] => esforço!
)

I want the return to be like this: 

Array
(
    [0] => motivação
    [1] => sentimento
    [2] => que
    [3] => nos
    [4] => impulsiona
    [5] => proporciona
    [6] => investir
    [7] => determinado
    [8] => grau
    [9] => esforço
)

Maybe regex would solve this problem, but I haven’t found a solution yet. How can I remove a character that isn’t a letter in a given string?

php

  • I think it would be enough to use something like [ A-boom].

2 answers

3


You can use preg_replace to remove characters that are not letters from a string. Then you can combine with array_map.

$callback = function ($value) {
    return preg_replace('/\W+/u', '', $value);
};

array_map($callback, $array);

I used the modifier u to recognize accented characters.

The expression \W+ means any character other than words.

  • I didn’t quite understand the /W+, it would not be better just to use the negation "marker" and to disguise what is not a-zA-Z by an empty string?

  • \W+ means any "non-word" Character.See on Documentation.

1

In Unicode, The first accented Latin letter has the code \u00c0 ("À") and the last is \u024F ("y"). You can select all letters using the basic (a-zA-Z) and the range between these two special characters. Thus:

[a-zA-Z\u00C0-\u024F]

And since they’re bracketed, denial is easy:

[^a-zA-Z\u00C0-\u024F]

Now just apply. You can try it on the browser console:

"Açaí, lingüiça, outras comidas acentuadas etc.".replace(/[^a-zA-Z\u00C0-\u024F]/g, "");

Note that you also remove the spaces and punctuation. Add a gap in square brackets if you want to preserve spaces between words, commas and dots if you want to keep score etc.

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