So, slowly learning more and more PHP... once and a while coming across stuff that talks about Regular Expressions... and every time I've seen it, or gone to try to learn it, its just confused the hell out of me. For some reason I just cant rap my mind around it.

So Im coming here for help. I have colon separated paired values... and I want to be able to remove one of the pairs, from somewhere in the string.
These values are of a 'Player' and there 'Character'. Such that:
Jaryth:Tarrax:James:Alex:Raymond:Kid
Jaryth, James and Raymond are all 'Players' and Tarrax, Alex and Kid are their respective 'Characters'.

Basicaly what Im looking to do, is to have the above string, go in, remove one of the Player:Character pairs, and return the modifed string.
Im guessing its going to look SOMETHING like the following:

PHP Code:

function pullout($string,$out){
preg_match($String, ^%**&^!%^><^^<>^ $out);
}
$string = "Jaryth:Tarrax:James:Alex:Raymond:Kid";
$out = "James:Alex"
$result = pullout($string,$out);
//This would... somehow return the string "Jaryth:Tarrax:Raymond:Kid" 


And I just cannot grasp Regular Expressions for the life of me... (hence the randomness). So would anyone be able to help me by creating the expression I would need?

PHP Code:

function pullout($string,$out){
$string = str_replace($out,"",$string); // Remove the $out from $string
$string = preg_replace("/[:]{2,}/",":",$string); // Replace any occurence of multiple colons by a single colon.
} 


Not tested, yet.

Woot, you've made my morning sir, I thank you.
In my tired state, it took me like 15 minutes of playing with it before I realized why it wasn't working XD. I had the function going... but for some reason it wasn't working... till I realized there was no return set, and $string wasn't a global.

in the end the this worked like a charm:

PHP Code:

function pullout($string,$out){
$string = str_replace($out,"",$string); // Remove the $out from $string
$string = preg_replace("/[:]{2,}/",":",$string); // Replace any occurence of multiple colons by a single colon.
return trim($string, ":");
}

//(As a note, that last trim there is to remove any trailing colons, like if the last pair was removed) 


Thank you very much for the expression! Maybe RegEx isnt as complicated as I though... hmm..

Talku++!