[RESOLVED] how to read a part of a string

[designxperts]

I have this string :
C' EOF'
i want to to know how many letters are inside the quotes???

[bradgrafelman]

First thing that popped into my head was a regular expression method:

function countLetters($string) {
	if(!preg_match("/'(.*?)'/", $string, $matches)) {
		return FALSE;
	}
	for($i=0,$count=0,$max=strlen($matches[1]); $i < $max; $i++)
		if(ctype_alpha($matches[1]{$i}))
			$count++;
	return $count;
}

$string = "'Hello world!'";
echo countLetters($string); // 10

Note that this function will return FALSE if the string doesn't have two quotes in it (i.e. doesn't fit your pattern), as opposed to 0 which means a pattern was found but that no letters were contained within the quotes.

[designxperts]

okay, but the strings i'm using have a Letter before the left quote. All my string have the format of C'EOF'
Using your code only works without that Letter. isn't there something that can be added to the regular expression so that it will count the letters inside the quotes with the presence of a letter before the first quote??
thanks.

[Weedpacket]

You could use [man]strpos[/man] to find the first quote - indeed, you could use it to find both quotes (using the offset parameter to skip over the first one after you've found it). Then the length of the string in between is (position of second quote)-(position of first quote)-1.

[bradgrafelman]

designxperts wrote:

Using your code only works without that Letter

Uhm.. no it doesn't?

$string = "C'EOF'"; 
echo countLetters($string); // 3

Weedpacket wrote:

You could use [man]strpos[/man]

That was my second idea after I started on the REGEXP method... I wasn't sure which was faster.

EDIT: Speaking of improving the function's speed, when you say "count the number of letters" do you mean only count the number of letters, or simply "count the number of characters" ? Using my function, the string 'Hello World!' would return a value of 10 because the function looks at each character and sees if it is a letter. If you're simply counting the number of characters inside the quotes, it becomes much easier.

[NogDog]

$numLetters = (preg_match("/'([^']*)'/", $string, $matches)) ? strlen($matches[1]) : 0;

[pcthug]

NogDog wrote:

$numLetters = (preg_match("/'([^']*)'/", $string, $matches)) ? strlen($matches[1]) : 0;

Should be:

$numLetters = (preg_match("/'([^']*)'/", $string, $matches)) ? strlen($matches[1]) : false;

[intenz]

Hmm.

[bpat1434]

And just in case you're not using just single quotes:

<?php

function countLetters($string) {
    if(!preg_match("/['\"](.*?)['\"]/", $string, $matches)) {
        return FALSE;
    }
    for($i=0,$count=0,$max=strlen($matches[1]); $i < $max; $i++)
        if(ctype_alpha($matches[1]{$i}))
            $count++;
    return $count;
}

$string = array("'Hello world!'", "C' EOF'", "A'ANEHA AWHENW#@(!!'", 'I have a "lovely bunch of" coconuts');
foreach($string as $str)
	echo $str.': '.countLetters($str).'<br>';

?>

Output:

'Hello world!': 10
C' EOF': 3
A'ANEHA AWHENW#@(!!': 11
I have a "lovely bunch of" coconuts: 13

[intenz]

Here you go...

<?php
$string = 'Let me search for the word inside the "quotes" so you can be safe';

$begin = strpos( $string, '"' ) + 1;
$end = strpos( $string, '"', $begin + 1 );

$word = substr( $string, $begin, $end - $begin );
echo $word . ' = ' . strlen( $word );
?>

[Weedpacket]

intenz wrote:

Here you go...

Pretty much what I said, except that I had the "+1" attached to the length calculation instead of being part of the start position; and not being asked for the exact content of the word between quotes I just calculated the length directly instead of using substr/strlen.

All we need to know now is if any of these are any good🙂

[designxperts]

WOW, thanks everyone i hope i get time today to try it out.

[designxperts]

Weedpacket wrote:

All we need to know now is if any of these are any good

They were all good and even more!!
Thanks to all.