Stripping out text characters from variables, leaving numbers and comma?

I need to be able to strip from characters from a few variables leaving only the numbers and the £ sign (unless of course mysql can add that in itself?) and also any . separators.

so if the variable $price_data contains

Now £193.95

How do I end up with

193.95 ?

R开发者_C百科eason I need this done is I need to be able to insert the data into the field as decimal, and be able to arrange it from least to most expensive.

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Depending on the input data it might be more reliable to remove any leading or trailing non-numbers:

$price = preg_replace('_^\D+|\D+$_', "", $price_data);

This leaves in the dot if enclosed by numbers, and would work with a literal £ as well as the £ escape, and removes any trailing garbage.

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try this:

$price_data = "Now £193.95";

list($t, $price) = explode('£',$price_data);

//$price should now contain 193.95

here is a demo: http://codepad.org/az87F5wA

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Financial data should be stored as integers, not floats due to loss of precision with floating datatypes: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precision_(computer_science)

Therefore, you should store it in MySQL as an integer (representing cents) using the following code to extract only the digits:

$subject = 'Now £193.95';
preg_match_all('/\\d/', $subject, $result, PREG_PATTERN_ORDER);
$result = implode( '', $result[0] );
if( !empty($result) ){
    $result = intval($result);
}else{
    $result = 0;
}
var_dump( $result );

Also, be careful when you perform division on integer types because you can "lose cents".

HTH