Regular expression help please.

mohamed42

I'd like to make it possible for someone to copy and paste output from a MUD that I play on into a text box, and then have a php script that will break that output down into manageable chunks and plop it nicely into a database. I'm pretty sure that regular expressions are the way to do it, but I'm not positive. Here's the output (a small portion of it) to be copied:

nexus 43 portal Unknown ( 0%)
(new line)
olos natural selection 80 polymorph Unknown ( 0%)
(new line)
minor watch 15 Unknown ( 0%)

The actual output is much wider, so you don't get the ugly formatting. I inserted the (new line) things myself to clarify.

What we're looking at here is, first off, the spell name. Then a bunch of spaces, then a number which shows the level of the spell. Then a few more spaces and (in some cases) a prerequisite. Not everything has a prerequisite though. Then a few more spaces, one of (Unknown | Novice | Student | Learned | Expert | Master), and then parentheses with a number between 0 and 130 inside, followed by a % sign.

Could anyone help me out with what sort of regular expression I'm going to need? If I can just get each of the seperate parts into their own variables, I can do the rest from there.

Thanks in advance for your help.
Dan

mohamed42

I'm reading over this again. Apparently, extra spaces are taken out when you post. The practical upshot of this is that the post you just read is a bit different from the actual output. Just imagine that there are between three and 30 spaces between the first word(s) and the first number, between the first number and the next, and so forth. If you need to see my phpinfo(), you can do so at
http://www.verlynia.com/phpinfo.php
Thanks, again.

vsego

^{(.+)[[:space:]]+([[:digit:]]+)[[:space:]]+((.+)[[:space:]]+)?(Unknown|Novice|Student|Learned|Expert|Master)[[:space:]]+([[:space:]]*([[:digit:]]+)%)$}

Output array:
[1] => spell name
[2] => level
[4] => prerequisite
[5] => unknown/novice/...
[6] => 0..130

Remember to use chop() or trim(), due to newline characters (i.e. if you read your file with file()).

I wrote this by heart - may have bugs - but the idea is here.

Good luck

mohamed42

Well, here's the code block in question:

$string = "bash 4 shield block Expert ( 76%)";
ereg(^{(.+)[[:space:]]+([[:digit:]]+)[[:space:]]+((.+)[[:space:]]+)?(Unknown|Novice|Student|Learned|Expert|Master)[[:space:]]+([[:space:]]*([[:digit:]]+)%)$),$string,$regs);}
echo $regs[1]." ";
echo $regs[2]." ";
echo $regs[4]." ";
echo $regs[5]." ";
echo $regs[6]." ";

And when I run it, it generates this error:

Parse error: parse error, expecting `')'' in /www/verlynia/school/stringtest.php on line 3

I double checked the parentheses, they all match up... oh wait... let me check one more thing... ok I added quotation marks around the expression, and IT WORKS! YES! Woo ha, yeah! does a victory dance Thanks for the help, there's no way I could've done it on my own.