PHP regular expression not working with string from database

Question

preg_replace does not return desired result when I use it on string fetched from database.

$result = DB::connection(\"connection\")->select(\"my          


        

Answer 1

It turns out you have Unicode dashes in your strings. To match all Unicode dashes, use

/[\p{Pd}\xAD]/u

See the regex demo

The \p{Pd} matches any hyphen in the Unicode Character Category 'Punctuation, Dash' but a soft hyphen, \xAD, hence it should be combined with \p{Pd} in a character class.

The /u modifier makes the pattern Unicode aware and makes the regex engine treat the input string as Unicode code point sequence, not a byte sequence.