> The problem is that PHP produces error messages whenever I run this
> function. I thought it would be something basic, since I'm not
> familiar with the ereg_ functions.

Okay, what specifically are the errors?

> Anyway it should work but it doesn't. It doesn't matter that invalid
> characters exist, as long as I can remove them. This is a script that will
> run over a large bunch of files, and not really user feedback based.

It should *NOT* work if it doesn't. :)  I know how frustrating these things
can be.

Keep in mind that ?, +, *, and | are special characters in REs and should be
preceeded with a backslash if you mean them in the literal sense.  '?' means
"optional", '+' means "one or more", '*' means "zero or more", and '|' means
"OR".

Since the backslash character is always a little... quirky, you need to
escape it.

You have \\ in your code, which means it will be parsed as a single '\'.
But for some reason, you need to escape it _TWICE_.  So your code should
look like this for it to work:

 $name = ereg_replace("/","",$name);
 $name = ereg_replace("\\\\","",$name);
 $name = ereg_replace(":","",$name);
 $name = ereg_replace("\*","",$name);
 $name = ereg_replace("\?","",$name);
 $name = ereg_replace("\"","",$name);
 $name = ereg_replace("<","",$name);
 $name = ereg_replace(">","",$name);
 $name = ereg_replace("\|","",$name);

This works for me.

> I have a feeling I'm doing something not idiomatic here. I'm not too happy
> with the solution, I would like to find a cleaner solution. One
> that doesn't involve parsing the string char by char!
>
> I guess a switch case checking char by char would be easy and do the job,
> but I wanted a cleaner solution.

What you should do is set up a character class.  What also works for me is
this (cleaner) solution:

$patt = "[/\\\\:\*\?\"<>\|]";
$name = ereg_replace($patt, "", $name);


Hope it helps,

Nik


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