various data in a text field

melaniehayes

Is there a way to separate parsed data into separate parts that can be formatted, and dealt with as separate fields in a record?

Ex:
cart field is a text datatype
includes info as such parsed two ways:
Product1 : Quantity : Price : Units ~ Product2 : Quantity : Price : Units // Product info separated by a ":", and products separated by "~"

I want to be able to use the data in the price section and format it as a decimal, and I want to be able to remove or ignore the units part.

Is this possible? If so, how?

Thanks.

Lars_Berg

Store each value in separate columns.

melaniehayes

How? It sounds like a great idea, but how?

tomhath

As Lars posted, it would be better to add a table to your database that stores a single Price/Quantity in each row and links back to this table with an ID column. This gets rid of the array you've hidded in the text column and all the problems that design brings with it.

If you really want to keep this design you could use one of the regular expression functions like preg_match_all(). Regexs are a wierd language into themselves but definitely worth learning.

http://www.phpbuilder.com/manual/function.preg-match-all.php

jeremuck

they are right, however if you really wanted to parse it and didn't want to use regexp, you can use split and explode and tok and the like.