how to replace all non alphanumeric characters with space in php?

$html=strip_tags($html);
$html=ereg_replace("[^A-Za-zäÄÜüÖö]"," ",$html);
$words = preg_split("/[\s,]+/", $html);

doesnt this replace all non (A-Z, a-z, a o u with umlauts) ch开发者_运维问答aracters with space? I am losing words like zugänglich etc with umlauts

is there any thing wrong with the regex?

edit:

I replaced ereg_replace with preg_replace but somehow the special characters like :, ® are not getting replace by space...

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If you succeed with your approach foremost depends on the encoding. When all umlauts got stripped, it's likely that your source text (or php script) was encoded as UTF-8.

In this case rather use:

$text = preg_replace('/[^\p{L}]/u', " ", $text);

This will match all letter characters, not just umlauts. And /u solves your likely charset problem.

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Maybe, your umlauts are still html-entities (ä etc.) which contain non alphanumeric characters, that would be deleted...

BTW: Alphanumeric isn't just a-Z but numbers as well...

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the regex should be /[^A-Za-zäÄÜüÖö]+/