Regular Expression Query

Hi,

I have a string in my program which can contain all parts of an address. If
any part of the address is missing, it still puts in the trailing comma - so
an address can look like

The Big House, Long Lane,,,London,,E1C 1VA

I want to run a regular expression on this to strip out the duplicate
commas. Visiting http://www.design215.com/toolbox/regexp.php, I worked out
that the expression I want is

/(,){2,}/g,", "

('worked it out' = it works on the tester on that site!)

I want to use this expression in code, and have tried

$longstring = "The Big House, Long Lane,,,London,,E1C 1VA"
$pattern = '/(,){2,}/g,", "';
ereg($pattern, $longstring, $shortstring);
echo "[".$shortstring[0]."]";

But nothing is displayed.

Can anyone point out where I'm going wrong?

Regards,

Pete.


.

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