[php] PHP regular expression - filter number only

I know this might sound as really dummy question, but I'm trying to ensure that the provided string is of a number / decimal format to use it later on with PHP's number_format() function.

How would I do it - say someone is typing 15:00 into the text field - what regular expression and php function should I use to remove the colon from it and make it only return the valid characters.

preg_match() returns array - so I can't pass the result to number_format() unless I implode() it or something like this.

Your help would be very much appreciated.

You could do something like this if you want only whole numbers.

function make_whole($v){
    $v = floor($v);
    if(is_numeric($v)){
      echo (int)$v;
      // if you want only positive whole numbers
      //echo (int)$v = abs($v);
    }
}

Another way to get only the numbers in a regex string is as shown below:

$output = preg_replace("/\D+/", "", $input);

This is the right answer

preg_match("/^[0-9]+$/", $yourstr);

This function return TRUE(1) if it matches or FALSE(0) if it doesn't

Quick Explanation :

'^' : means that it should begin with the following ( in our case is a range of digital numbers [0-9] ) ( to avoid cases like ("abdjdf125") )

'+' : means there should be at least one digit

'$' : means after our pattern the string should end ( to avoid cases like ("125abdjdf") )

You can try that one:

$string = preg_replace('/[^0-9]/', '', $string);

Cheers.

use built in php function is_numeric to check if the value is numeric.

To remove anything that is not a number:

$output = preg_replace('/[^0-9]/', '', $input);

Explanation:

• [0-9] matches any number between 0 and 9 inclusively.
• ^ negates a [] pattern.
• So, [^0-9] matches anything that is not a number, and since we're using preg_replace, they will be replaced by nothing '' (second argument of preg_replace).