How to remove all characters except Alphabets, Numbers and Dashes

Question

I want to remove all characters except Alphabets, Numbers and Dashes. Here is my code

$tracking = "(TCS-123412&2)";
$tracking = preg_replace("/[^ \w]+/", "", $tracking);
echo $tracking;

The output is = TCS1234122

I want the output should be = TCS-1234122

Please help.

Regards

Answer 1

You need to include all characters which you do not want to exclude in the negative character class. Note that \w also includes underscore, which you presumably want to retain.

$tracking = "(TCS-123412&2)";
$tracking = preg_replace("/[^A-Za-z0-9-]+/", "", $tracking);
echo $tracking;  // TCS-1234122