Need help with Splitting up Form Data

[gamak]

Okay, So i'm a n00b at PHP, and I was hoping someone help me out.

I have a form with one large text box which the user basically copies data into. The data copied into the text box looks like this:

-------example of copied data---------------------------------------------

Peter Griffin <[e-mail]>; Meg Griffin <[e-mail]>; Stewie Griffin <[e-mail]>

The form data is then sent to proccessbigtextboxpage.php ( I know how to do this)

What I need to do is some how take the First Name and Last name and Email address and break it up and store it into a database.

So I can get the data to look something like:

$first_name = array("peter", "meg", "stewie");
$last_name = array ("griffin", "griffin", "griffin");
$email_address = array("[e-mail]", "[e-mail]" , "[e-mail]");

I know how to store all of the data into a database, but I don't know how to break it all up to store it into a database. I think it has something to do with preg_match and PRCE or something, but I'm really lost

[juronimo]

you could do it a couple of different ways.

You could explode on the semicolons.

$fields = explode($_POST["textbox"]);

Then you have to break it apart further.
You could use a regular expression to break apart the email address, the ereg() command will do the trick. A Regular expression for emails looks something like

$regex = "/^[a-zA-Z0-9 \._\-]+@([a-zA-Z0-9][a-zA-Z0-9\-]*\.)+[a-zA-Z]+$/";

After filtering out the email addresses, you can then break apart the names by using spaces, with a pretty basic regular expression or another explode command.

You could go through all of that or design your form better. Your problem isn't coming up with the code to break apart the data. Regular expressions and or explode commands can do it, or any of the text parsing commands (sttrchr, substr, etc). Your problem is related to the design of you application. One problem you could easily run into is that you have no idea what users are putting in that text box, therefore you have no idea what you're putting into your database.

[NogDog]

First thing that comes to mind:

<?php

$data = "Peter Griffin <[e-mail]>; Meg Griffin <[e-mail]>;
Stewie Griffin <[e-mail]>";

$first_name = array();
$last_name = array();
$email_address = array();
$addys = preg_split('/\s*;\s*/', $data);
foreach($addys as $add)
{
   preg_match('/^(.+\s)?([^\s<]+)\s*<([^>]*)>/', $add, $matches);
   $first_name[] = $matches[1];
   $last_name[] = $matches[2];
   $email_address[] = $matches[3];
}
echo "<pre>";
print_r($first_name);
print_r($last_name);
print_r($email_address);
echo "</pre>";

[gamak]

you Rock No Dog. You have no idea how long I spent trying to figure this out. I think this will help met out a ton! ! ! !