Regex & Newline Break... cry for help!

gregchet

I'm trying to do what I thought would be a simple regex replacement, but no matter what I try it doesn't seem to want to work.

I'm trying to do a regex search for the below text (which is part of the $string variable):

** Hand History for Game 1111111111 **

25 NL

$pattern = "/\*\*\*\*\* Hand History for Game ([0-9]*) \*\*\*\*\*\\n25/i";
$replacement = "test";
preg_replace($pattern, $replacement, $string)

1) As soon as I move the "25" up a line so that it's right after the last * on the previous line, and then remove the "\n" from the regex search it works fine, which is how I know it's a newline issue.

2) As suggested by other information I've found online (including php.net), I've tried "\n", "\\n", and "\\n" in the regex search, but none of them work.

Does anyone have any suggestions before I pull the rest of my hair out? 😛

bradgrafelman

Have you tried simply \n ?

EDIT: Also, different operating systems use different character sequences for linebreaks. If you want to accomodate for all of them, try doing something like \s for a line break (which actually matches any whitespace character).

gregchet

Yes. I've tried anywhere from 1 preceding slash to 7, but I didn't want to admit that here because I knew I was just grasping at straws, hehe.

bradgrafelman

Try this for a pattern:

$pattern = "/\*\*\*\*\* Hand History for Game ([0-9]*) \*\*\*\*\*\s+25/i";

EDIT: Just updated my suggestion - try this one. Worked for me.

EDIT2: Also, if you wanted to cleanup your pattern:

$pattern = "/\*{5} Hand History for Game ([0-9]*) \*{5}\s+25/i";

gregchet

I just tried "\s+25" through "\\\s+25", as well as "[\s]+25" and "([\s]+)25", but still no luck.

gregchet

As well as using a * instead of the + in all cases

bradgrafelman

Well then I'd say you need to rethink what you're doing, or at least examine the data, because it worked in a test case for me:

$data = '----------
***** Hand History for Game 1111111111 *****
25 NL
----------';

$pattern = "/\*{5} Hand History for Game ([0-9]*) \*{5}\s+25/i"; 

if(preg_match($pattern, $data))
	die('Found it!');
else
	die('Not found.');

The above code snippet printed 'Found it!'.

gregchet

Yeah, I think I'm going to re-work how I'm doing this. I was basically trying to have the output of these hand histories (party poker) to appear in the same format as one of my other hand convertors (pokerstars), but the text is in a different order so I don't think just searching and replacing is going to give me what I need (especially with the newline search not working for me).

I do have one other question now though, fairly unrelated.

Is there any way to pull certain text that's matched OUT of a multiline variable so that it can be used somewhere else in the code?

For example, I want to match a multiline variable on "posts small blind 1" with something like "posts small blind (0-9)", but pull the "1" out so that it's assigned to its own variable and can then be used within the rest of the code. There isn't an easy way to do this, is there?

bradgrafelman

Yes. When you surround something in ()'s in a REGEXP code, it's matched as a... oh what's the term, a subset or something. Heh... bit weak on my regexp terminology.

Anyway, you would do something like this:

$pattern = '/posts small blind ([0-9]+)/';
if(preg_match($pattern, $subject, $matches)) {
     $posts = $matches[1]; // 1 because its the first subset. 0 contains the full string matched
} else {
     $posts = NULL; // do something here if the REGEXP wasn't found
}

gregchet

Oh my god, I freakin' love you!! Just not in "that" way! LOL!

Thanks a lot man, I appreciate it!