Easy regex problem-- I thought!!

mangotree22

Hi!!

I thought this was going to be an easy regex problem but I am having some problems.

I have a string:

$string = "Code: 6562 Name: John Smith Product: Cheeseboard and knife Colour: Orange Material: Stelle and plastc";

I am trying to use a regex to extract the 'data' from this string, I need to get the type of data (ie. Colour) followed by it value (ie. Orange). But I don't always know what the type of data is. I do know that it will be allways be Xxxxx: (ie. CapitalLetter-letters- colon)

Here is my code

if(preg_match_all("/[A-Z][a-z]🙁.)[A-Z][a-z]*:/", $string, $reg)) :
for($j=0; $j<count($reg[0]); $j++) :
echo "<b>" . $reg[0][$j] . "</b><br>";
endFor;
else :
echo "no match"
EndIf;

I have tried many variations of this but still seem to get nowhere.
Anyone willing to give me a pointer in the right direction?

Thanks

Shrike

Maybe a longshot depending on the data, but if you ALWAYS have

Xxxx: 123

e.g. ALWAYS a capital letter followed by more letters, followed ALWAYS by colon (and optional space) and then some more characters, and then a REQUIRED space, you could say:

$string = "This:123456 That: 123456 Theother:123456";
$partsofstring = preg_split("/[^:]\\s/si", $string);
print_r($partsofstring);

Actually all thats needed is the space, and the regexp makes sure there is no colon in front of it, much easier 🙂

TTT

i hate these preg and ereg functions ... didn't test this but it might work

$stringASarray = explode(":",$string);
$data = array();

for($a=1;$a<count($stringASarray);$a++) {
if($a==count($stringASarray)) { // last
array_push($data,LTRIM($stringASarray[$a]));
} else {

array_push($data,substr(LTRIM($stringASarray[$a]),0,-strrchr(LTRIM($stringASarray[$a])," ")+1));
}

}

chaotica

try

$splitstr = preg_split('/\s+([A-Z][a-z]*):\s+/', ' ' . $string, -1, PREG_SPLIT_DELIM_CAPTURE);
array_shift($splitstr);  

$data = array();
for ($i=0; $i < count($splitstr)-1; $i += 2)
{
    $data[$splitstr[$i]] = $splitstr[$i+1];
}

as with some of the other replies, this code hasn't been tested. 🙂
if it does work as i think it will, though, what it will do is split the string into an associative array. You'll be able to get $data['Product'] or the like, or just loop over the whole thing with a foreach loop.
(PHP arrays rock.) 🙂
(Update: added the ' ' . to line 1, and the array_shift() at line 3. The first tag wasn't getting captured, and the first tag was preceded by an empty string. So yeah, it's been tested now.)