TextArea parsing to different variables

[szrachen]

I would like to be able to parse a text area. What I am doing now is letting the user paste some information
into a text area and then it goes to a php document for processing. I'm not sure how to do this yet
in PHP, but I'm guessing that there should be some way of taking the variable and parsing it into different
variables.

Example(the user enters this in the text area):

First Name: Blah1

Last Name: Blah2

How would I go about taking out "First Name:" and "Last Name:" and storing Blah1 and Blah2 in their
own variables?

Thank you for any help.

[brandonschnell]

depends.

its best if possible to create seperate inputs for each bit of entered data.

otherwise you'll be getting the textarea text back in a string. how the user formats the text is critical. assuming its cut and paste and formatted the same every time you can play some games with this.

for example:
First Name: Blah1
Last Name: Blah2

in a string it'll look like:
First Name: Blah1\nLast Name: Blah2\n

the first quick and dirty hack that comes to mind is to use the php function split() to split the string into an array. to make things interesting try to split on newline chars ("\n") & on comma chars (":") at the same time using a regular expression.

now you'll have an array like so:
First Name:
Blah1
Last Name:
Blah2

and now you've got an array with even elements the name of the fields and odd elements the data.

now loop through using array & list() & each() (or foreach()). clean up the elements with a trim() when accessing the array elements. make sure you're accessing a valid index on the array.