[RESOLVED] Stuck on extracting alpha-numeric value from a string

[dmacman1962]

Hi Everyone,

I am stuck and I am trying to get a value from a string and break it apart into 2 new strings.

IE: I have a description field that contains text like this...

6.1.6.B- Economics: Explain the basic questions that all economic systems attempt to aswser. (What goods and services should be produced? How will goods and services be produced? Who will consume goods and services?)

And break the values apart so I can format it like this...

<table width="500" border="0">
  <tr>
    <td width="50" valign="top"> 6.1.6.B- </td>
    <td width="450" valign="top">Economics: Explain the basic questions that all economic systems  attempt to aswser. (What goods and services should be produced? How  will goods and services be produced? Who will consume goods and  services?)</td>
  </tr>
</table>

And to achieve the display format I need, I want to take the values in each instance like "6.1.6.B- " (this value is different for each and could be longer in length (IE: 13.12.4.D) and strip that out and assign it to a variable. And take the remainder of the field and assign that to another variable.

I know that the value shown above should be in a seperate field, but they did not setup the data that way and I am forced to deal with it as is.

I tried str_replace and preg_replace, but I seem to be stuck with getting an unknown "search string" value and replace with a known.

I am trying to understand a response like NogDogs here, that shows the characters like /^\d etc. Where did you get the reference to convert 0001 to this?

$output[] = preg_replace('/^\d*\s*(.*)/e', 'str_replace("  ", "", trim("\\1")).".com"', $line); 

I do appreciate any help/suggestions.

Thanks a bunch,
Don

[NogDog]

If there will always be a space after the ID number:

$parts = explode(' ', trim($text), 2);  // NOTE: the 2 is important
printf("<tr><td>%s</td><td>%s</td></tr>\n", $parts[0], $parts[1]);

[dmacman1962]

Worked exactly like I wanted. Great work!

So I understand,
-- the explode used the ' ' as a delimiter for a space after the - and the "2" was the limit (I assume by using 2, it processes the first one and stops before the 2nd instance. Otherwise it would have removed 2 spaces in the text). So basically, the first white space was used to break the left and right halves apart.
-- the trim removed that white space.
-- and the printf displayed the 2 "$parts[0] and $part[1]" with the '%s'

Was that correct?

Just trying to understand so I don't end up asking again. 🙂

Thanks, you rock.

Don

[NogDog]

The trim() was just to make sure there were no leading spaces before the first character that would screw up the explode(). (Paranoia is a useful trait for programmers. 😉 )

The "2" for the 3rd arg of explode says not to break the string up into more than two parts, so after splitting on the first space in the string, no more exploding is done and everything after the first space is crammed into the 2nd element of the resulting array. (Without that 3rd argument, every word would have had its own, separate array element.)

[dmacman1962]

That makes sense. Thanks for taking the time to explain it, it really helps.

Owe you one.

Don

[bradgrafelman]

Don't forget to mark this thread resolved.

[dmacman1962]

Sorry brad, I did mark it about 2 minutes after nogdogs post. Dont know why it did not take it. I re-marked it.

Thanks,
Don