I am trying to compare two strings and remove any characters that appear in second string. For example:
$stringA="abcdefg" ;
$stringB="ayfcghifh" ;
I want $stringB to be "yhih". Are there any ways to do it?
Thanks for the help...
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3 Answers
str_replace(str_split($stringA),'',$stringB);
Comments
echo ereg_replace("[" . $stringA . "]", "", $stringB);
would be a convenient way to do so.
Or using preg_replace()
$stringB = preg_replace('/[' . preg_quote($stringA, '/') . ']/', '', $stringB);
As an added benefit, you can have case-insensitivity with the /i modifier and Unicode support with /u.
4 Comments
Josh Davis
Good idea but bad execution, you should use preg_replace() instead, as ereg has been deprecated in 5.3. I'll append it to your answer if you don't mind.
Jim
I would highly suggest against ereg_replace. It is depreciated in PHP 5.3. That and for something this simple, str_replace will do just fine, no need for a regular expression.
Josh Davis
I would definitely recommend that approach over
str_replace() as it is more flexible and its performance is in the same order of magnitude.
clausvdb
Oops, preg_replace is the better choice, of course. The str_replace() approach seems wiser anyway, since you don't have to worry about escaped characters either.
You can use multiple needles in str_replace() to remove each character from $stringA. Assuming we're talking about single-byte encoding, you can use str_split() to separate each character, which gives you:
$stringB = str_replace(str_split($stringA, 1), '', $stringB)