Remove Quotes and Double Quotes from a string in PHP

This article, will discuss multiple ways to remove quotes and double quotes from a string in PHP.

Table Of Contents

Background

Sometimes, while processing text data in PHP, you may need to remove quotes from a string for various reasons, like sanitizing input or preparing data for display. For example, if you have a string like “This is a ‘sample’ string”, you might want to remove the quotes and double quotes, resulting in This is a sample string.

Solution 1: Using str_replace()

The str_replace() function in PHP can be used to replace all occurrences of a specified search string with a replacement string in a given string. Here, you can use it to replace both single and double quotes with an empty string.

Let’s see the complete example,

<?php
$originalString = "This "is" a 'sample' string";
// Remove both single and double quotes
$cleanString = str_replace(array("'", '"'), '', $originalString);

// Display the result
echo $cleanString;
?>

Output

This is a sample string

In this example, str_replace(array(“‘”, ‘”‘), ”, $originalString) replaces all occurrences of both single and double quotes in $originalString with an empty string. This method is straightforward and efficient for removing specific characters from a string.

Solution 2: Using Regular Expressions with preg_replace()

If you need more control or want to handle more complex patterns of quotes, you can use preg_replace() with a suitable regular expression.

Let’s see the complete example,

<?php
$originalString = "This "is" a 'sample' string";
// Regular expression to remove single and double quotes
$cleanString = preg_replace('/['"]/', '', $originalString);

// Display the result
echo $cleanString;
?>

Output

This is a sample string

In this code, preg_replace(‘/[‘”]/’, ”, $originalString) uses a regular expression that matches both single (‘) and double quotes (“), and replaces them with an empty string. This method is powerful and can be adapted to more complex scenarios involving patterns or different types of quotes.

Summary

To remove quotes from a string in PHP, you can use either the str_replace() function for a simple and direct approach, or the preg_replace() function with a regular expression for more advanced scenarios. Both methods are effective for cleaning up strings and removing unwanted characters, such as single and double quotes, from text data.