Preg replace help

[SJshah]

Yup, seems to work now I used this to trim the spaces from the beginning and the end:

    $result = trim($result); 

But that brings up another problem, there are extra hyphens at the beginning and the end after the numbers/words under 3chars have been deleted. It needs to trim any remaining hyphens from the beginning and end too, before trimming the whitespace. I tried these lines but neither worked:

    $result = trim($result, "-"); 

    $result = preg_replace('/[-]*(\r{0,1}\n)[-]*/', '$1', $result);