Regex or not?

[essexboyracer]

Im rackng m brain on this one, we have data coming in via email, which I have piped into my script to extract data, then insert into MySQL.

The data look somewhat like this;

Do you own a car: No
If you own a car, how many years NCB do you have: 2926


POLICY DETAILS
Date policy to commence: 23 Nov 2005
Policy Cover: Third Party Only

Things to note, there are blank lines and about 5 headings, all UPPERCASE, which I would want removed in order to keep things simple. In addition we have sub headings for data, which delimits on a :

I havn't done any regexp for a few years now and it sends shivers down me spine. Have looked at ltrim but just had a migraine. Any help appreciated

EBR

[brandtj]

<?php

$item = 'Do you own a car: No
If you own a car, how many years NCB do you have: 2926


POLICY DETAILS
Date policy to commence: 23 Nov 2005
Policy Cover: Third Party Only';

$item = str_replace ("\r", '', $item);
$item = preg_replace ('/([A-Z]{2,})([^\n]+)(\n)/', '', $item);

while (stripos ($item, "\n\n") !== false) {
	$item = str_replace ("\n\n", "\n", $item);
}

$item = str_replace ("\n", "\r\n", $item);

echo $item;

?>

It doesn't seem to be the most efficient code in the world, but I ran it and it did the trick. 😃

Hope it helps!

[essexboyracer]

Thank you Brandtj, I shall give it a whirl today and see what happens. I think I can deal with the : between the data and sub headings. Probably trim or ltrim. In the PHP manual it says you can specify a charlist for trim, but it doesn't say how you actually do that, e.g.

$trimmed = ($item, 'a-z');

or do you have to specify each character;

$trimmed = ($item, 'a,b,c,d,e,f,g,h......x,y,z');

Regards
EBR

[essexboyracer]

Gave the code above a bash, and it did work, the only thing I missed was the fact that some fothe data may contain UPPERCASE characters. I came up with this as well as some additions to put the data into an array;

$item = str_replace ("\r", '', $item);
$item = preg_replace ('/(QUOTE|DETAILS|PROPOSER|CONTINUED|POLICY|VEHICLE)([^\n]+)(\n)/', '', $item);

while (strpos ($item, "\n\n") !== false) {
	$item = str_replace ("\n\n", "\n", $item);
}

$item = str_replace ("\n", "\r\n", $item);
$item = stristr($item, 'Title:');

//echo $item;


$item = explode("\n",$item);
//print_r($item);

$arrayLength = count($item);

for ($i = 0; $i < $arrayLength; $i++){
	$item[$i] = stristr($item[$i], ': ');
	$item[$i] = str_replace (": ", '', $item[$i]);
	$item[$i] = rtrim($item[$i]);
    echo "[" . $i . "]  [" .$item[$i] . "]<br>\n";
}

It works, I dont know if it is the best/efficient/fastest way to handle the data but for now i'm happy. I only hope the email that we get sent doesn't alter. Thank you BrandtJ for the starting point, I never know how to crack regexp. If you do them allday long then i spose you get used to `em!