extra a number from a filename...

[Anon]

couldn't quite get my problem succinctly stated in the title!

I have a [unlimited] number of files with the format:

list##.htm

where # can be any number from 0 to ~ (well, not quite, but you get the picture). The filename is loaded into $file

What I want to do is
1. match $file for the pattern
starts with

• the next comes a [numer] followed by [.htm]
  2. extract the number from the file

  I know the ereg() pattern matches for 'starting with', 'ending with' and of course 'contains', but what about the sequence of the matches?
  Am I going to have to do some substr or something to walk the string etc?

  any help greatly appreciated
  Andy

[sarahk]

There's no shame in using
$num = substring($file, 4);
$num = substring($file, 0, func($file, ".htm",4))

where func is the code to find the position of the ".htm" string - don't have my phpdocs handy. But you get the idea.

ereg can be great when the formatting varies greatly. I don't know how much advantage you would get in this instance.

[Anon]

thx
thought it was the way to go... np to fast forward the string to extract the number.

Will have to put a few conditionals in I suppose to prevent trying to extract other files not matching the exact format but was just wondering if there was a Q&D way to do it (always looking for shortcuts!)

cheers

[Anon]

if (ereg("^list", $url_array[$i])) {
$offset_start=strpos($url_array[$i], "list", 0);
$offset_end=strpos($url_array[$i], ".htm", 4);
$offset_length=$offset_end-4;
$offset=substr($url_array[$i], 4, $offset_length);
}

[crimaniak]

if(preg_match('/^list([0-9]+)\\.htm$/',$file,$result))
{
  echo result[1];
}