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cleanse_string()

Parameters

ColumnTypeDefaultDescription
$string
$preserve_separators
$preserve_hyphen false
$is_html false

Location

include/search_functions.php lines 2203 to 2248

Definition

 
function cleanse_string($string, $preserve_separators, $preserve_hyphen = false, $is_html = false)
{
    # Removes characters from a string prior to keyword splitting, for example full stops
    # Also makes the string lower case ready for indexing.
    global $config_separators;
    $separators = $config_separators;

    // Replace some HTML entities with empty space
    // Most of them should already be in $config_separators
    // but others, like ­ don't have an actual character that we can copy and paste
    // to $config_separators
    $string = htmlentities($string, ENT_QUOTES | ENT_SUBSTITUTE, 'UTF-8');
    $string = str_replace(' ', ' ', $string);
    $string = str_replace('­', ' ', $string);
    $string = str_replace('‘', ' ', $string);
    $string = str_replace('’', ' ', $string);
    $string = str_replace('“', ' ', $string);
    $string = str_replace('”', ' ', $string);
    $string = str_replace('–', ' ', $string);

    // Revert the htmlentities as otherwise we lose ability to identify certain text e.g. diacritics
    $string = html_entity_decode($string, ENT_QUOTES, 'UTF-8');

    if (
        $preserve_hyphen
        && (substr($string, 0, 1) == "-" || strpos($string, " -") !== false) /*support minus as first character for simple NOT searches */
        && strpos($string, " - ") === false
    ) {
        # Preserve hyphen - used when NOT indexing so we know which keywords to omit from the search.
        $separators = array_diff($separators, array("-")); # Remove hyphen from separator array.
    }
    if (substr($string, 0, 1) == "!" && strpos(substr($string, 1), "!") === false) {
            // If we have the exclamation mark configured as a config separator but we are doing a special search we don't want to remove it
            $separators = array_diff($separators, array("!"));
    }

    if ($preserve_separators) {
            return mb_strtolower(trim_spaces(str_replace($separators, " ", $string)), 'UTF-8');
    } else {
            # Also strip out the separators used when specifying multiple field/keyword pairs (comma and colon)
            $s = $separators;
            $s[] = ",";
            $s[] = ":";
            return mb_strtolower(trim_spaces(str_replace($s, " ", $string)), 'UTF-8');
    }
}

This article was last updated 9th July 2025 12:35 Europe/London time based on the source file dated 29th June 2025 21:20 Europe/London time.