ereg_replace Help

Anon

I have a file with several thousand lines... as an example they contain the following:

foo 8
foo 10
foo 200

I need to replace the spaces between 'foo' and the #... and as noted, the spaces drop as the number increases...

What would the ereg_replace be?

Thanks.

Anon

ereg_replace ("(foo)([:space:])(.*)", "\1#\3", $string);

that should find the space and print foo#number

Anon

Thanks...

ereg_replace ("(foo)([:space:])(.*)", "\1#\3", $string);

What's the \1\#\3 ??

(.*) means any character in any amount, right?

vsego

\1 - whatever suited the stuff in first pair of brackets (here: "foo")
\3 - guess for yourself :-)
# - escaped "#"

Anon

Gotcha.

A variant of the problem I had presented itself this morning.

While the solution to the spaces worked, I cannot implement it.

foo 3
foo 12
foo 123

Turns out, the text file needs to remain a fixed length per line, as it is imported into a database by column number.

In essence, all I am needing to do is split the file by the same 'foo' number... so I would end up with several fixed length text files with the same 'foo' numbers in them..

I was going to use grep with a redirect to a text file. So foo3.txt would include:

foo 3 ...
foo 3 ...
foo 3 ...

But, getting rid of the spaces, although great for the sorting, destroys the fixed length of each line.

Any ideas?

vsego

You can create an associative array, where key will be line without spaces and value will be the original line. Then use ksort() or some other key sort. After sorting, write the output to the file (values only, of course).

Note: if two lines can produce exactly the same key, append some other value as well - time in miliseconds or something - to the key.