Split a string into alpha and numeric parts

dcjones

Hi all,

I have a string "Departed 9:00" and I need to split it in to alpha and numeric parts.

The code I am playing with is:

$RemarksWithTime = "Departed 9:45";

list($_SESSION['remark'], $_SESSION['time']) = 
      preg_split('#(?<=[a-z])(?=\d)#i', $RemarksWithTime); 

// the output is

Array
(
    [time] => 
    [remark] => Departed 9:45
)

// What I am looking for is:

Array
(
    [time] => 9:45

[remark] => Departed )

As you can see I'm not the world best using preg_split, can anyone see what is wrong.

bradgrafelman

Try adding a space between the lookbehind and lookahead groups (e.g. after the ')' of the lookbehind and before the '(' of the lookahead).

dcjones

Hi Brad,

Again many thanks for your reply.

I am sent an XML file and one of the elements is a time as a string but if the time is less than 10:00 the leading zero is not present, so I want to add it before writing it to a table.

The code I have come up with works but is there a better way of doing it.

$RemarksWithTimeTemp = "Departed 9:27";


list($_SESSION['remark'], $_SESSION['time']) = 
      preg_split('#(?<=[a-z]) (?=\d)#i', $RemarksWithTimeTemp); 

$RemarksWithTime =  str_pad($_SESSION['time'], 5, "0", STR_PAD_LEFT);

bradgrafelman

If the space is optionally present, then you can add a '?' after the space character in the regular expression pattern so that it will be matched 0 or 1 times (in other words, if it isn't there, no problem).

If you want to always have 5 characters for the time, I would use [man]sprintf/man with a placeholder such as '%05s' to left-pad the string to 5 characters.