Check for a colon and space

[cybereclipse]

I'm writing a simple php program that expect a text in the format book chapter:verse e.g. Matthew 6:2

So far, I've separated the book name from the number part by a space. I've printed them separately with an error message if the space isn't found and it won't process it. Here is my code.

<?php
  if ($_GET) {
	  if ($_GET['citation']>"") {
		  print "Input detected<br />";
		  if (strpos($_GET['citation'], " ")){
			  $xname = explode(" ", $_GET['citation']);
			  print "Book: " . $xname[0]. "<br/>";
			   print "Text: " . $xname[1]. "<br/>";
		  }else{
			  print "There was no space<br />";


	  }
  }
  }
  print "<form action=\"" . $_SERVER['PHP_SELF'] . "\" method=\"get\">";
  print "Text:<input type=\"text\" name=\"citation\" value=\"" . 
    $_GET['citation'] .
    "\" ><br />\n";
  print "<input type=\"submit\" />";
  print "</form>";
?>

Here is the challenging part. How do I check for a colon? If I don't put the colon, the program won't process it. How do I do that? Thanks for your help.

[bradgrafelman]

You could simply repeat the same checking/exploding process for the colon that you're already doing for the space, only your source string would be the second array item from the first explode() call.

Or, you could instead grab all three pieces of data at once using regular expressions and [man]preg_match/man. Example regexp pattern I would use for capturing books/verses from the bible would be:

/(?P<book>(?:[1-4] )?[a-z ]+) (?P<chapter>[1-9][0-9]*):(?P<verse>[1-9][0-9]*)/i

(which probably looks a lot more daunting than it really is if you've never worked with regular expressions before).