How to remove all special characters from a string

Question

I am facing an issue with URLs, I want to be able to convert titles that could contain anything and have them stripped of all special characters so they only have letters and numbers and of course I would like to replace spaces with hyphens.

How would this be done?

Answer 1

Hello @kartik,

This should do what you're looking for:

function clean($string) {
   $string = str_replace(' ', '-', $string); // Replaces all spaces with hyphens.

   return preg_replace('/[^A-Za-z0-9\-]/', '', $string); // Removes special chars.
}

Usage:

echo clean('a|"bc!@£de^&$f g');

Will output: abcdef-g

Hope it helpss!!

Thank you!!