prasing a filed

Anon

Hello I have a field that has the city, state and zip code concantinated together and want to just retrive the state and stuff it in a drop down box. Can anyone help me out with some code that might do this?

Here is an examle of some fo the data

Washington, DC 20217-0002

Thanks

Anon

I think the easiest way to parse this would be to use explode.

Say your field name is "location." Then say you did a mysql_fetch_array (or used whater db abstraction you prefer) and got a row as an array.

So now, $row[location] equals "Washington, DC 20217-0002"

Now do the following:

// explode the location string into an array
$location = explode(" ", $row[location]);

// the first part is the city, but get rid of the trailing comma
$city = str_replace(",$", "", $location[0]);

//the second part is the state
$state = $location[1];

//the last part is the zip
$zip = $location[2];

If you're looping through an array of rows, you'll want to do:

$i = 0;
while ($row = mysql_fetch_array($result)) {
$location = explode(" ", $row[location]);
$state[$i] = $location[1];
print $state[$i];
// do whatever you want with $state[$i]
}

Then you have an array of all the states.

Anon

Ok thanks I was able to take your example and make it work however I ran into a problem. There are cities such as New York that when I look at my drop down will have York in the drop down not NY. This is because of the space between New and York. I have tried a number of different combinations however no luck.

I was wondering if there is a way to look for the comma count over one space and take the next two letters and then stuff that into an array as the state? Or am I making this to complicated?

Thanks again....

Anon

You're right, that's a little trickier. I was thinking all your states would be the postal abbreviations, e.g., "NY."

This might be a good place to use the function strtok. Check out the manual entry if you want to explore that route.

At first glance, I would try something like this:

<pre>
$i = 0;

while ($row = mysql_fetch_array($result)) {

$location = explode(" ", $row[location]); 

$state[$i] = $location[1];

//the next part is the zip, unless the state has two words.  if $location[3] is set and 
//this chunk of the line doesn't look like a zip code, append it to the state and make 
//the next chunk the zip code

if (isset($location [3]) && !ereg("[1-9-]{10}", $location[2]))  {

	$state[$i] .= $location[2];
	$zip = $location[3];

} else {

	$zip = $location[2];
}

print $state[$i]; 

// do whatever else you want with $state[$i]

}
</pre>