regex matching 3 "-"'s

[bike5]

I thought I had a regular expression problem but I located the problem and its with the strtok, not my regex in above code--

I need to use strtok on a variable I have and break it on a "---", three dashes in a row, however, it seems to break on the last "-" in the string, even if it is only one dash.

$val1 = '---Invalid E-mail.';
$tok = strtok($val1,"---");
echo $tok;// prints -> Invalid E

it "should" be a emtpy variable.

I discovered a quick hack to fix this but I would like not to have to use this method. I have to pad the $val1 var with anything infront of the --- and it works right. As long as the "---" is not the first three characters in the variable it works right. However, I would like this to be able to work with a variable having "---" as the first three chars.. Any ideas?

[toplay]

If you look at the code example in the manual:
http://us2.php.net/manual/en/function.strtok.php#AEN175869

you'll see that strtok() can only break on one character boundaries. So, '---' means break it up if you come across a dash, or a dash, or a dash. It doesn't mean break it up when you come across three dashes.

Just use preg_split() instead. Example:

$val1 = '---Invalid E-mail.';
$chunk = preg_split('/---/', $val1);
echo $chunk[1]; // Displays: Invalid E-mail.

But this is a better example in case there's more than one set of three dashes in the string:

$val1 = '---Invalid ---E-mail.';
$chunk = preg_split('/---/', $val1);
for ($i=0, $cnt = count($chunk); $i < $cnt; $i++)
        echo $chunk[$i], '<br>'; // Displays: <br>Invalid <br>E-mail.<br>

hth.

🙂

[bike5]

Thank you, I didn't even know about preg_split. Works nice. 🙂