i'm creating a functions that will remove and add brackets at the beginning and end of the string. what is the best function to remove the character from a string. i was thinking about using ltrim() and rtrim OR str_replace()... which is more efficient? (see code below):

<?

function remove_brackets($element) {
    $last_char = strlen($element) - 1;
    if(strpos($element,"{") == 0 && strpos($element,"}") == $last_char) {
        $element = ltrim($element,"{");
        $element = rtrim($element,"}");
        return $element; }
}

$string = "1,{2:4:5},2,{6:8:10},3,{11:14}";
$string = split(",",$string);

echo remove_brackets($string[1]);

?>

thanx in advance :D:D

the genuine genius

__________________
www.campusgrind.com - college portal

well,
first your remove_bracket function should first test if ($last_char > 0).
it could prevent some errors but also make your function more efficient in case it wouldn't work anyway.

about the strReplace or lTrim/rTrim :
in both ways, you will have to run two functions :
in one case : strReplace "{" and strReplace "}"
in the other : lTrim and rTrim

all those function are php standard so i guess we can trust the developers on having optimized their code.
my opinion would be that the lTrim/rTrim should be more efficient, because it won't parse the whole string as strReplace would (and twice), but strReplace would remove all your brackets in any position within your string. depends on what you want.

to conclude, about your function, you shouldn't test the existence of brackets the way you do.
what you're doing is :
are the brackets in the first AND last position of the string ?
but you should do:
are my first AND last characters brackets ?
not that it would be faster (maybe it would, i don't know), but it should really avoid some errors...

php/java developer
NTIC engineer

Another suggestion:

$len = strlen($str);
if(($len > 1) && // must be at least two chars long: "{}"
   ($str[0] == '{') &&
   ($str[$len - 1] == '}'))
{
  $str = substr($str, 1, $len - 2);
}


This way, you have a simple way of testing that BOTH end characters are the proper braces, and you use substr() to trim the ends off.


Take care,

Nik
http://www.bigaction.org/