Regular expressions

Mat-d-Rat

Hi there, hope you guys can help! I'm not a PHP coder by nature (Delphi/Pascal) but I can kinda wing my way (probably badly!). However I'm trying to write a feature and I'm having problems! I believe the answer lies in regex but I'm not sure.

Quick synopsis -

Table full of player names

Scripts polls bf2 server and gets players names

Script now needs to see if player is on the table....

Easy enough - BUT - the player will have a prefic on his name which can if in 3 different formats, each containing different layouts and data.

e.g. the online format should be 2X.YYY.Name - where X=Squad and Y=Rank e.g. 2.H.Pvt.Mat-d-rat - I have a list of the formats (only 3 at the moment) and I was thinking that if I can preg_match the name then I should be able to delete the front part off it and find the player in the database!

So I start to look at regular expressions - well I understand some of it, but then it all goes to pot!

e.g. I believe my expression needs to be
starts with 2
any character/number
period
any group of chars (2-4)
period

So tried to start to form this into an expression /^2/ but then it all went to pot 🙁

If someone can help me through this, can you even do random length wildcards as such? Or am I barking up the wrong tree, and if so which tree should I be barking up instead.

TIA

Hummingbird

Try '/[A-Za-z0-9]{2}.[A-Za-z]{2,4}.[A-Za-z0-9]/'

If you want to drop the first part, you may want to try using explode (). You could break the string into an array by splitting it at the spots where the periods are.

Weedpacket

Um, "character/number": numbers (or at least, digits) are characters - so I take this to mean "letter/digit" (not only that but I'm assuming English letters!).

/^2        #starts with 2
[a-z0-9]   #any letter or digit
\.         #full stop
[a-z]{2,4} # 2-4 letters
\.         #full stop
#i for case-insensitive matching
#x for extra whitespace (and comments!)
/ix

Mat-d-Rat

Thanks weed, that makes sense!! I've got 3 to do, but based on that info I think I can work the others out.

As for exploding the data... I might need to do that as well, but I need to now who to explode it, so by matching it I can then work on it 🙂

Mat-d-Rat

OK, look slike it's all wokring... I cheated for the tag removal, I used preg_replace with "" as the replacement 🙂 works a charm!