search for number of character

[Kyo]

Is there a character to find a certain number of character?

Kinda like "t%s" were % is any number of characters. I'm trying to find the symbol for just one so say "...." it would only find something in the field that has 4 characters.
Can't seem to find a a character to represent 1 character in a search.

Heres my coding the "????" is what I need to figuer out.

while ( $a_row = mysql_fetch_row( $result) )
{
echo "<tr>\n";
foreach ( $a_row as $field )
if ( $field == "????")
{
do this
}
else
{
echo "\t<td>$field</td>\n";
echo "</tr>\n";
}

Looking forward to responce's 🙂

[drtebi]

If you only need to know the number of characters that are in the variable, you can simply use strlen($field), so your code would be

while ( $a_row = mysql_fetch_row( $result) ) 
{ 
echo "<tr>\n"; 
foreach ( $a_row as $field ) 
if ( strlen($field) == 4) 
{ 
do this 
} 
else 
{ 
echo "\t<td>$field</td>\n"; 
echo "</tr>\n"; 
} 

Otherwise, if you want to know if it's a "chain" of characters, like let's say you want to find "mouse" - a 5 character word - in "the mouse is cool", you could do something with preg_match:

while ( $a_row = mysql_fetch_row( $result) ) 
{ 
echo "<tr>\n"; 
foreach ( $a_row as $field ) 
if (preg_match("/.*[a-zA-Z]{4}[^a-zA-Z].*/", $field)) 
{ 
do this 
} 
else 
{ 
echo "\t<td>$field</td>\n"; 
echo "</tr>\n"; 
} 

The pregmatch says "look until you find exactly 4 characters (from a-z, small or capital), followed by something not a character"

Hope that helps 😃

[Kyo]

Alot easier than I expected 🙂

Worked greate!

Thanks