regex - Remove all hyphens, special characters etc. from string in PHP

Solution:

This should work :

$string = preg_replace("/[^a-zA-Z]+/", "", $string);
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if you want to keep numbers, use this one :

$string = preg_replace("/[^a-zA-Z0-9]+/", "", $string);
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Solution:

If you need to get only letters, remove all that are not letters:

preg_replace('~\P{L}+~u', '', $input)
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The\P{L} is a Unicode property that matches all characters other than Unicode letters. See the regex demo.

If you need to also handle diacritics (i.e. if you need to keep them), use

preg_replace('~[^\p{M}\p{L}]+~u', '', $input)
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where\p{M} matches any diacritic symbol, and[^\p{M}\p{L}]+ matches 1 or more characters other than letters and diacritics.

See another demo.