Regular Expressions, begginner here

[freakyfreak]

Ok, I am need to maniplate some text and have barely any experience with regular expressions. I have been trying for two days to come up with a way to get it done but am failing miserably.

I need to creat a regular expression that will take text like

Bands: American Head Charge, Smilin Liar, Stigma;

and change it into

Bands American Head Charge, Bands Smilin Liar, Bands Stigma,

for some reason I can only get a regexp to grab the first word. I need this to be dynamic cause there can be any number of subtopics . Can anyone help or point me in a good direction?

[[deleted]]

If you have a list of comma seperated values like

"American Head Charge, Smilin Liar, Stigma"

you could

explode

it.

See PHP manual for details.

http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.explode.php

[freakyfreak]

See I am already doing that. This is for indexing photo stock lists. We have our subscribers listing off descriptions of pictures for our book. I am trying to get a better way of letting them do categories. Most of the listing are like

boy on see-saw, man in car, young punk lady, boy at home, boy at school

where we can just let them do boy: on see-saw, at home, at school; man in car, young punk lady,

I have worked up a form that will allow them to creat these on the fly with some nice little javascript that will keep it formatted that way.

Once it is that way in there I want to convert it back to the old way with that common word infront of them so our indexing program will be none the wiser about how the data was originally entered.

[[deleted]]

This is what I had in mind

<?

$names = "American Head Charge, Smilin Liar, Stigma"; 
$bands = explode(",", $names);

$prefix = "Band"; // or boy, man, girl, $row[sub_topic], whatever

echo "$prefix ".$bands[0].", $prefix ".$bands[1].",  $prefix ".$bands[2];

?>

I don't know where "man in car, young punk lady," are coming from as they don't appear to have any relationship with "boy".

[freakyfreak]

Those other words don't have anything to do with it. That is half the problem. There will be other descriptions that shouldn't be touched by it. I need some way of detecting where the word is with the colon right after it and then taking all the phrases and words after it until a semi colon appears.

(don't you love bosses that have an idea then tell everyone that it will work this way but never consults the programmer)

ps I appreciate the help.

[ednark]

<?php

header('Content-type: text/plain');

$string = 'Bands: American Head Charge, Smilin Liar, Stigma;';

/*
lets say a word is any sequence of one or more lettern numbers underscores or dashes

[\\w\\d_-]+

you want to match a word with a : at the end
*/

$regex = '/[\\w\\d_-]+:/';

/*
you now want to capture anything after that up untill a ;
*/

$regex = '/[\\w\\d_-]+:\(.*\);/';
preg_match( $regex, $string, $matches );
print_r($matches);
$bands = explode( ',', $matches[1] ); 
print_r($bands);


/*
here im trying to get each band with a regular expression, can't seem to figure this out though
this is the basic concept, with captures in parens... however i can't seem to make php remmber a list of multiple mathes for the parens
---:\(---\)\(,\(---\)\)*;
*/

$regex = '/[\\w\\d_-]+:\([^,]+\)\\s*\(,\\s*\([^,]+\)\)*\\s*;/';

preg_match_all( $regex, $string, $matches, PREG_SET_ORDER);
print_r($matches);

preg_match_all( $regex, $string, $matches, PREG_PATTERN_ORDER);
print_r($matches);

?>

[freakyfreak]

Thank you thank you thank you. I really need to get regexp's down. Thank god(or goddess or whatever deity that you believe in) for kind hearted people.

[freakyfreak]

Well thanks for the leads. I have gotten it done. Here is the code

$string = "Osceola: bridge, high school, library; Bands: American Head Charge, Smilin Liar, Stigma;  test it all out this should not show up but THIS: should, work, now huh;";

preg_match_all("/[\w\d_-]+:/", $string, $cat);
$subcat=split("[ [:alnum:]]+:", $string); 

for($i=0;$i<count($subcat)+1;$i++){
	$cat_full = $cat[0][$i];
	if($cat_full!=""){
		$subcatsplit = explode(",", $subcat[$i+1]);
		foreach($subcatsplit as $key=>$value){
			echo str_replace(":", "", $cat_full)."".str_replace(";", "", $value).", ";
		}
		echo "<br>";
	}
}

It will output this
Osceola bridge, Osceola high school, Osceola library,
Bands American Head Charge, Bands Smilin Liar, Bands Stigma,
THIS should, THIS work, THIS now huh,

I know the code is not pretty but it works and this is not live code, only for our internal use where performance isn't the issue but getting it to work is.

Now I just gotta get it to do multiple word categories