cutting a piece out of a string...

elesueur

Im having a problem formulating a pattern identifier for cutting the start and end off a string.

index.php?area=search&searchterm=google&section=news

I would like to set $search_string to google, as in the query string above. so I would need to cut
index.php?area=search&searchterm=
off the beginning, and
&section=news
off the end.

Any help appreciated.

Weedpacket

You can use [man]strpos/man to find where "searchterm=" starts, and note that the bit you actually want starts 11 characters further along from there - use [man]substr/man to get the rest of the string. Then use strpos() again to find the first "&" in what remains, because that's where the bit you're interested in ends.

This could also be done in two lines if one of them uses preg_match(), but that seems like overkill.

elesueur

Thanks for that.. I managed to pull it off in the end 🙂

does anyone know of a good tutorial on writing string comparison patterns? ive looked around, but none of the ones ive found give useful examples...

Weedpacket

Originally posted by elesueur
Thanks for that.. I managed to pull it off in the end 🙂

does anyone know of a good tutorial on writing string comparison patterns? ive looked around, but none of the ones ive found give useful examples...

If you mean the ones used in preg_match() and its ilk ...
The regexp syntax used in those functions is known as "PCRE", short for "Perl-Compatible Regular Expression", Perl being the language where the syntax was developed. "Perl regular expression introductory tutorial" is hence a good search phrase to start with; what few differences there are between Perl itself and PHP's implementation are covered in a subsection of the manual's section on pattern syntax.

For the current problem, the regexp could be

/(?<searchterm=)(.*?)&/