Help me with this regex

lucianoes

I have a very long text file, and it has to be input into a page. Here is the deal:

Many of the lines contain the symbol '#' in the middle. There is always something before or after the symbol, it's a pattern. Many of the lines do not contain the '#' symbol.

I have added a before every line, now I want to add an extra before all lines that do NOT contain the '#' symbol. Here is my script:

<?php
$file = 'C:\docs\longtext.txt';
$file = file("$file");
if (!$file)
{print "Failed!"; die;}
else
{$content = join("", $file);}

------------------------------

$result = ereg_replace ("^{(.*)^#$",} " \1\2", $content);

print "$result";

This is obviously not working, but I don't know why.

Regular expressions can be tricky indeed...

    Luciano ES
    Santos, SP - Brasil

[deleted]

qiuck guess
not tested

$file = 'C:\docs\longtext.txt';
$file = file("$file");
$h=fopen($file, "w");
foreach($file as $row){
if(ereg("#", $row)){
fwrite($h, $row);
}
else{
fwrite($h, " ".$row);
}

}
fclose($h);

lucianoes

No, I solved it. I was using file(), so the whole file was treated as one single huge string instead of one string for each line. You used file too, and creates an error. Besides getting rid of file(), I had to use "ungreedy" mode to match everything correctly. Here is the final script:

<?php
$file = 'C:\docs\longtext.txt';
$file = fopen("$file", "r");
while (!feof ($file))
{$line = fgets($file, 4096);
$result = preg_replace ("/^{(.[#])(.)$/U",} "\1\2 ", $line);
$result2 = preg_replace ("/^{([^#]+)\n/U",} "\1 ", $result);
$result3 = preg_replace ("/\r /", " ", $result2);
print "$result3";}
fclose ($file);

?>

Thanks,
Luciano ES
Santos, SP - Brasil