Level 104
Why complicated the regex:
$url = "https://example.com/products/3283284939";
if (!str($url)->startsWith('https://example.com/')) {
preg_replace(/* etc */);
}
Apr 20, 2022
6
Level 6
PHP regex help - hide numbers but not when they are on a specific url
Hello there.
I have a regex to hide all phone numbers, but it also hides them when someone sends a url of my website.
For example:
Test message, this is my product: https://example.com/products/3283284939
this becomes:
Test message, this is my product: https://example.com/products/hidden
Any ideas how could I instruct regex to ignore this when the match starts with this specific URL?
Hoped that this: /(?!https://www.example.com.*$)+?[0-9][0-9()-\s+]{6,12}[0-9]/
would work, but actually it doesn't.
Level 6
@tykus but the url can be wherever inside the string. for example:
"test test test https://example.com/products/3283284939 test "
Level 104
Your regex would need to be a negative lookbehind (?<!) rather than negative lookahead (?!) to match the group before the main expression. The problem now is the lookbehind expression cannot be variable length, so you need to given the full URL that you are expecting, e.g.
/(?<!https:\/\/example.com\/products\/)(\d{6,12})/
Now the 6-12 length digits should be captured and replaced only whenever they are not preceded by https://example.com/products/
Level 6
@tykus that's great, thanks a lot BUT (unfortunately ahh :( ) what if the domain is Dynamic? because it is. For example, on each product, it also contains let's say username (which is dynamic length), like this:
Level 104
@Ninj4df you won't be able to solve this with a single regular expression AFAIK - it is a limitation of lookbehind.
Level 27
There are thousands of different ways to write phone numbers, and most of them also coincidentally match things that aren’t phone numbers.
I don’t think there is any way to use regex to “hide phone numbers”. That’s much too broad and ill-defined a concept.
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