Remove last characters of strings using regex

Question

I need to find a way in PHP to remove the last portions of 2 strings using regex's. This way once they are stripped of the extra characters I can find a match between them. Here is an example of the type of string data I am dealing with:

categories_widget-__i__
categories_widget-10

So I would like to remove:

-__i__ from the first string
-10 from the second string

Thanks in advance.

How do you identify the last portion of your strings ? With '-' ? You don't really need regex for that — Clément Malet, Sep 01 '14 at 07:57

Avinash Raj · Answer 1 · 2014-09-01T08:21:31.230

You could try the below code to remove all the characters from - upto the last.

<?php
$text = <<<EOD
categories_widget-__i__
categories_widget-10
EOD;
echo preg_replace("~-.*$~m","",$text);
?>

Output:

categories_widget
categories_widget

- matches the literal - symbol. And .* matches any character following the - symbol upto the end of the line. $ denotes the end of a line. By replacing all the matched characters with an empty string would give you the desired output.

score 0 · Answer 2 · edited Sep 01 '14 at 08:11

0

$str1 = "categories_widget-__i__";
$str2 = "categories_widget-10";
$arr1 = explode("-", $str1);
$arr2 = explode("-", $str2);
echo $arr1[0];
echo $arr2[0];

edited Sep 01 '14 at 08:11

Clément Malet

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answered Sep 01 '14 at 08:03

Divyesh Bhalodi

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score 0 · Answer 3 · answered Sep 01 '14 at 08:15

0

Is the last occurrence of a hyphen the only thing that's important? If so you don't need regex:

$firstPart = substr($str, 0, strrpos($str, '-'));

» example

answered Sep 01 '14 at 08:15

Emissary

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score 0 · Accepted Answer · answered Sep 01 '14 at 08:43

0

(.*)-

This simple regex can do your job if - is the splitting criteria

See demo.

http://regex101.com/r/rX0dM7/7

answered Sep 01 '14 at 08:43

vks

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Remove last characters of strings using regex

4 Answers4