Reg Exp

[plisken]

Hi. I need some help with a regular expression i use in my script.
The following expression matches a key-value pair in the form of "key=value" inside an INI file:
(?<key>[^{=])=(?<value>[=])}

My problem is that the key-value pair might be in these forms as well: "key =value" or "key= value" or "key = value"
I totally suck when it comes to regular expressions and I'm hoping that a smart reader can help me solve this problem.

[mrmufin]

Since the problem seems to involve an unkown amount of 'whitespace' which might encompass either the 'key' or the 'value', you could just use trim() to remove surrounding whitespace prior to doing your evaluations:

trim($key);
trim($value);

[plisken]

I got it working. I have another problem though. I need to filter out the key-value pairs that are comments. ( The ones that start with a ; ). Do you know how to write it?

Thanks!

[mrmufin]

Probably a safe assumption that whitespace could bugger up matters here, too:

$string = " ; some .ini file comment...";
if(ereg("^;", trim($string))) {
	echo "This line starts with a semi-colon.";
}

[NiXXeD]

I just thought I'd take a shot in the dark about this one. If you didn't want to use trim(), you could try this regular expression:

ereg('^{(😉[a-zA-z0-9-]+[} ]=[ ][a-zA-z0-9-]+$', $value);

I haven't gotten a chance to test it, but I think it should work. You could use eregi, and change the bounds for the key/value, but I didn't feel like changing it. Hope it works =0