current community

your communities

more stack exchange communities

Stack Exchange
tour help
careers 2.0
Take the 2-minute tour ×
Stack Overflow is a question and answer site for professional and enthusiast programmers. It's 100% free, no registration required.
up vote 1 down vote favorite

Say I have strings: "Sports Car (45%)", or "Truck (50%)", how can I convert them to "Sports_Car" and "Truck".

I know about str_replace or whatever but how do I clip the brackets and numbers part off the end? That's the part I'm struggling with.

share|improve this question
1  
Do you always have "String (Int%)" ? Use regular expression... –  Glavić Nov 26 '11 at 17:33

4 Answers 4

up vote 1 down vote accepted

You can do:

$s = "Sports Car (45%)";
$s = preg_replace(array('/\([^)]*\)/','/^\s*|\s*$/','/ /'),array('','','_'),$s);

See it

share|improve this answer
up vote 1 down vote

There are a few options here, but I would do one of these:

// str_replace() the spaces to _, and rtrim() numbers/percents/brackets/spaces/underscores
$result = str_replace(' ','_',rtrim($str,'01234567890%() _'));

or

// Split by spaces, remove the last element and join by underscores
$split = explode(' ',$str);
array_pop($split);
$result = implode('_',$split);

or you could use one of a thousand regular expression approaches, as suggested by the other answers.

Deciding which approach to use depends on exactly how your strings are formatted, and how sure you are that the format will always remain the same. The regex approach is potentially more complicated but could afford finer-grained control in the long term.

share|improve this answer
up vote 0 down vote

A simple regex should be able to achieve that:

$str = preg_replace('#\([0-9]+%\)#', '', $str);

Of course, you could also choose to use strstr() to look for the (

share|improve this answer
    
That returns "Sport" instead of "Sport_Car" –  user1022585 Nov 26 '11 at 17:38
up vote 0 down vote

You can do that using explode:

<?php
$string = "Sports Car (45%)";
$arr = explode(" (",$string);
$answer = $arr[0];
echo $answer;
?>
share|improve this answer

Your Answer

 
discard

By posting your answer, you agree to the privacy policy and terms of service.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged or ask your own question.