Regular Expression help

Hi,

At the minute I have some output from a page where the variables will look like this..........

id1cat1
id1cat4
id3cat1
id5cat2

etc

Can anyone help with a regular expression that will get out the id and then the category from each line and put them into an array.

I've been looking and think thats its close to

/id(\d+)cat(\d+)/

but I don't know much about REGEX and theres not too many good tutorials for what I need.

Thanks

Hoi,

Is "id1cat1" the name of your variable or is it the value of your variable ?

Yeah those are the values.

I basically need to put the id into one field in a database and the category (cat) into another.

After trying it out for yourself, you may find that it does work 🙂

preg_match("/id(\d+)cat(\d+)/", "id42cat13", $matches)
echo "Id is ".$matches[1]."; cat is ".$matches[2];

There's a bunch of extra decorations you can add to make it more robust, but that's the basics right there.

Thanks. I did try it like that but wasnt sure in what way to use the preg_match function in order to get out the correct values from $matches.

🙂

Hiho,
I would suggest something like:

$sMyVar = "id42cat13";
list($iId,$sCategory) = explode("cat",ltrim($sMyVar,"id"));

I think it is a bit faster than the use of preg_match().