Searching for character combos

[Anon]

Hi there!

Im working on a script that will allow an admin to remotely control a Half Life (game) server. At the moment im writing a part that will list the players currently on the server

I send the request to the server, and it returns a string in this format

(yea, the slashes are escaping the chars)
\1FirstPlayerName\0\0\0\0\0\2SecondPlayerName\0\35\0\0\0

etc..
anyway.. as you can see; each player starts with <player number>, then the player's name, then a set of 5 escaped chars. the 1st and last 3 are \0's, but the second one always keep changin, anythin from 0 to 255.

I know you can do this usin the preg_replace function, but im totally confused on the regular expression stuff 🙁

another confusion: the second number that keeps changing could be a \1 or a \2 etc... so it can interrupt splitting the string up to find individual player by the playernumber.

Would anyone be able to give me an example of replacing the \0#\0\0\0 format with somthin such as.. a 'Z' ?

Anyone up to the challenge? (lol)
thanks very much 😃

PS. if someone solves the problem i'll put them in the credits/about section of the script 😃

---

Daniel Ingegneri
http://omegasoft.ws

[Anon]

Righty ho, We have a string with a buncha records in it, each record contains a buncha fields.
Record format:

playernum: 1 char
playername: String
c: 1 null char
something: 1 char
e: three null chars

Y'know, if it weren't for the fact that you've got multiple records in a string, substr() could probably handle this...but let's do the work with a single regexp. Call the string $string ('cos I'm feeling really imaginative tonight).

preg_match_all('/(.)(.+?)\0(.)\0\0\0/s',$string,$matches,PREG_SET_ORDER);

1st playernum will be found in $match[0][1]
1st playername will be found in $match[0][2]
1st something will be found in $match[0][3]

2nd playernum will be found in $match[1][1]
...

That's the raw data hauled out. Let's make it easier to work with:
foreach($matches as $match)
{
$player[ord($match[1])]['name']=$match[2];
$player[ord($match[1])]['something']=$match[3];
}

So Player 1's name is in $player[1]['name'] and that extra character is in $player[1]['something'].

Is that a help? I haven't touched on the "other confusion" 'cos I was confused by the description.

[Anon]

yea! cool thanks, this works

but there was somthin i didnt mention:

After the last 3 \0's (after a name) there was another 3 characters that represented how long a player has been connected to the server for. i could just use the ord function and decode in unix time format.

ANYWAY to get to my statement (😃)

this is the modified version of the line u wrote:

preg_match_all('/(.)(.+?)\0(.)\0\0\0(.)(.)(.)(.)/s',$HLServerStats,$matches,PREG_SET_ORDER);

since im not sure how the replace stuff works, i guessed that (.) represents one character, so i just put 3 of em 😃

i cant make it retrieve the actual time thingy, but i did get it to get the names 😃

thanks alot, i've stuck your name and webpage link in the about section if u want 🙂

---

Daniel Ingegneri
http://omegasoft.ws

[Anon]

You could grab the last three (you show four, but I guess one's a typo🙂

/(.)(.+?)\0(.)\0\0\0(...)/

Then $match[][4] will contain all three characters. If I read you right, this is just a single integer spread across three bytes. It could be turned back into a number in the obvious way:

(
ord($match[][4]{0})256+
ord($match[][4]{1})
)256+
ord($match[][4]{2})