pregreplace woes

mikelat

EDIT: Sorry in advance for this long page.

Hey everyone. I've been messing with preg_replace, and out of all the things in PHP, this is the only thing I seriously don't understand. php.net doesn't help at all, and tutorial sites don't help. The format for each string value is

Test,Test,58636,Y,1C1,1U2,Y1,934667,9727677, ,\"346mdfsh13\",\" \",,TTI1FGGHADHDFHFADHMFADFGDFAFHC,\"\",\"John, A\"

This is one entry per line:

$tex = preg_replace("\/n(.+?),(.+?),(.+?),(.+?),(.+?),(.+?),(.+?),(.+?),(.+?),(.+?),(.+?),(.+?),(.+?),(.+?),(.+?),(.+?),(.+?)","\$do->parse('\\1','\\2','\\3','\\4','\\5','\\6','\\7','\\8','\\9','\\10','\\11','\\12','\\13','\\14','\\15','\\16','\\17')",$tex);

Keep getting this error: Warning: Unknown modifier ',' in /home/street/public_html/text/omg.php on line 22

If any of you could tell me whats causing this problem, and maybe any other forseeable problems, if you could please post it. Thanks in advance.

vaaaska

Everytime I have a problem with preg_replace I switch it to str_replace and it's good.

Woops...brain fart. You have a big regex in there...better not switch. 😉

Weedpacket

Are these lines coming from a file? If so, then [man]fgetcsv[/man] might cause less grief.

What I can see is that you have no delimiters on your regexp, and that you've got / and \ reversed right at the start (Does this line start with a \n?). You're also missing the e modifier on the end. Also, you will want to replace '+' with '*' or your expression won't matchin lines with empty fields (like the one before TTI1FGGHADHDFHFADHMFADFGDFAFHC).

(Hint: You can also use $1, $2, etc. in the replacement text if that will make it easier to read).

/\n(.*?),(.*?),(.*?),(.*?),(.*?),(.*?),(.*?),(.*?),(.*?),(.*?),(.*?),(.*?),(.*?),(.*?),(.*?),(.*?),(.*?)/e

That will still choke if the string fields can contain commas.

mikelat

Thanks! I'll give it a try tommorow and tell you how it turns out 😉

Drakla

You could also get rid of all those question marks if you use the toggle greediness option U

[EDIT] actually would this be the same thing?

/\n(?🙁.),){16}(.)/eU

DAMN smiley thing, just change the square brackets to normal ones

/\n(?:[.],){16}(.)/eU

And following on from Vaaaaska's simplistic brilliance couldn't you just explode the strings by commas, implode again with "', '" and then put the rest of the string around it?

$bits = explode(',', $line);

$bits = implode("','", $bits);

$endProduct = "\$do-> parse('" . $bits . "');";

mikelat

I got it to work perfectly! Thanks 😃