Escaping a plus sign (+)

[donatello]

How does one escape a plus sign in PHP, or rather get it to work in the following script:

PHP Code:

$who = preg_replace('/\%20/', ' ', $who);
$who = preg_replace('/-/', ' ', $who);
$who = preg_replace('/+/', ' ', $who);


The first two expressions work fine, the last is crashing, so there must be a problem with the + being executed instead of parsed as text the way I want... I've tried a backslash to no effect... (I'm not very good at PHP )

I'm trying to capture an URL which includes plus signs:
http:// www.URL . com/file.php?dog+cat+mouse

I'm stripping out the dog+cat+mouse and then stripping the plus signs, replacing them with spaces.

[NogDog]

You could use urldecode() on the string (it should take care of the "+" and any "%xx" characters), then apply any other changes you need to the result.

[donatello]

Originally Posted by NogDog

You could use urldecode() on the string (it should take care of the "+" and any "%xx" characters), then apply any other changes you need to the result.

Thanks!

It works like a charm:

PHP Code:

$who = urldecode($who);
$who = preg_replace('/-/', ' ', $who);


[thraddash]

You should really be using the str_replace function instead, as it seems you don't need a regular expression to do the match.

PHP Code:

$who = str_replace('-', ' ', $who);


[donatello]

Originally Posted by thraddash

You should really be using the str_replace function instead, as it seems you don't need a regular expression to do the match.

PHP Code:

$who = str_replace('-', ' ', $who);


Thanks for the tip, done!<P>
Maybe one of these days I'll know what I'm doing in PHP...

Can anyone explain why? I'm curious to know...
is preg_replace more taxing on Apache?
is preg_replace being deprecated?

or is it just good programming?

Thanks!

[criterion9]

str_replace has less overhead and is less taxing on the processor especially when you are just replacing a single character. More complicated replaces/searches can justify the extra overhead of the ereg/preg functions.