Reg exp

thoand

Hi I've converted a Excell files to a tab delimited file
and some of the data get quoted like:

"Lens 16mm for 1/2"" & 1/3"" cam."

How can I remove the first and the last quote in the string,
and have only 1/2" and 1/3" ?

regards
Thomas A.

tekky

if they are always in a format similiar to that... ie " somettext here with possible "'s in them and then one at the end like this"

you could simply do

$var = substr($var, 1, strlen($var)-2); //start at 2nd char which isnt a " and go on to 2nd from last char which is also not a "

thoand

thanks, but in my case it will not work,
because the data does not always contains quotes

It seems that both semicolon and tab seperated datafiles get quoted if there are a quote inside the string like:

Tandberg 48" television

So I guess I have to do som reg exp in my application, but are searching for a simple way to do this 🙂

thomas

tekky

ahhh I'm not that experienced with reg exp yet... just dabbled with them when I have to 🙂

Weedpacket

Why would you need to use regular expressions? If double quotes are doubled inside double-quoted strings in this format, then all you need to do is replace doubled double quotes with single double quotes. str_replace() will do that. Then just drop the quotes on the ends. tekky's code will do that.

tekky

he said they arent always like that.....

my code would drop ANY first and last character.... for it to be affective would need to add an ifcheck to the it to actually ensure the front and last char are in deed quotes.... then it would work properly 🙂

thoand

allready don that Tekky,
thanks for help

Thomas

tekky

hehe GMTA, your welcome 😉

Weedpacket

Originally posted by tekky
he said they arent always like that.....

my code would drop ANY first and last character.... for it to be affective would need to add an ifcheck to the it to actually ensure the front and last char are in deed quotes.... then it would work properly 🙂

Well, yeah. I kinda thought that would have been obvious 🙂

tekky

Originally posted by Weedpacket
Well, yeah. I kinda thought that would have been obvious 🙂

You'd be suprized at some of the IM's/PM's I get asking about code I posted or how to do somethings.... :rolleyes: