How to strip a string in PHP from everything besides numbers

Question

Question by devirkahan

Currently when I echo a string I have saved it looks like this:

• 94% positive ·

What I want to have instead is simply:

94

I thought that the following would do the trick:

preg_replace(“/[^0-9]/”,””, $string)

But for some reason (I am assuming the bullet point) doing so instead gives me this:

94018332

Any help to get just the “94”?

Answer 1

You are correct, the bullet point is being handled as an HTML entity and therefore contains numbers.

However, since your format is specific enough, you can use a better regex:

preg_match("/d+(?=%)/",$string,$match);
$percentage = $match[0];

This regex specifically searches for numbers followed immediately by a percent sign (and only the first such match).

Answer 2

You can use the filter functions to filter the number out.

$yourString =  "• 94% positive";
$int = filter_var($yourString, FILTER_SANITIZE_NUMBER_INT);
echo $int; //WIll echo 94