Regular Expression Replacement.

Xeen

Hi all. I'm having a really hard time trying to figure out how to perform a particular function. I'm not very good with regular expressions, and just can't seem to work out what I'm going for.

Basically, we receive support emails, and have an automated function to stuff the body of the email into a database. I'm writing an interface to the database and need to display the results returned from the db to a webpage. However, we generally have several spams full of HTML code that gets crammed into the db. Things work fine until I get some spam message that has <HTML><CODE><WITHOUT><ANY><SPACES> in it. This throws the tables and entire page out of whack.

Since the body of the email is all in one variable, I need to go through a single variable and search for a string of X amount of characters without a space between them.

Examples: I want to split a string that has 5 characters without spaces. I don't want to reformat anything other than exact matches.

$variable1 = "1234567890"
$fixed_variable1 = "12345 67890"

$variable2 = "123 456 7890"
$fixed_variable2 = "123 456 7890"

$variable3 = "123456 7890"
$fixed_variable3 = "12345 6 7890"

Any thoughts on how to do this?

nemonoman


$test=strpos(substr($variable1, 0, 5),' ');
if($test===false) /* not found */
{$fixedvar=substr($variable1, 0, 5).' '.substr($variable1, 5);}
else {$fixedvar=$variable1:}

Is this what you meant? Probably I'm missing something...

sijis

i'm not an expert in regular exp nor am i good at it.

i have a question though, you are not just splitting number but text as well, right?

what you are saying is if a word has more than 5 characters, give it a space, correct?

i'm sure this is wrong, but it's an idea. maybe.

preg_repace(/[0-9a-zA-A].*{5}/, " ",$string);

what i'm going for is this:
if a string (either being number or letter) has exactly 5 characters give it a space.

my references were:
http://www.phpbuilder.com/columns/dario19990616.php3
http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.preg-replace.php

Xeen

Originally posted by sijis
i'm not an expert in regular exp nor am i good at it.

i have a question though, you are not just splitting number but text as well, right?

what you are saying is if a word has more than 5 characters, give it a space, correct?

i'm sure this is wrong, but it's an idea. maybe.

preg_repace(/[0-9a-zA-A].*{5}/, " ",$string);

what i'm going for is this:
if a string (either being number or letter) has exactly 5 characters give it a space.

my references were:
http://www.phpbuilder.com/columns/dario19990616.php3
http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.preg-replace.php

That's a quite a bit closer to what I was looking for. The substr functions are quite a bit more tricky because of the varying lengths and positions I'll be at within the variable. But I also need to make sure that there are no spaces within the string that I'm checking, if there are then I want to just go on to the next string. And, because we get multi-language emails and html formatting, I can't limit it to just letters and numbers, but really any character other than a space.

I'm currently trying to build a function based roughly on what nemonoman suggested, but I would still love any additonal help or ideas.

A perl friend of mine spat this out at me, but not knowing a whole lot of perl, nor the use of preg, I'm not sure how applicable it is:

$variable =~ s/(\S{80})/$1 /g;

sijis

hmm.. i'm not exactly sure but i think the conversion would be like this:

original: (i don't even have a clue what that's suppose to do. 🙂
$variable =~ s/(\S{80})/$1 /g;

using preg_replace();
// preg_repace(/perl reg exp/, return value, input string)
$variable = preg_replace(s/(\S{80})/g, /$1/, $string);

also, if you want other character not just numbers or letter.. just add the other characters. but the 'special' characters need to be escaped (eg. . or [). Although i don't remember right now, but some of them you don't have to escape AND i'm not sure if its outside the range brackets or inside the range bracket. (ex: [a-z])

preg_repace(/[0-9a-zA-A []{}.\?].*{5}/, " ",$string);

hth.