The dreaded regular expression

Anon

Hi, I am not new to php but I am new to regular expressions, I guess I should really try to get to grips with it once and for all but I just seem to miss the point somwhere along the line.

What I want to do is parse a keyword search string eg.

accountant "west london" excel

into an array

[0] -> accountant
[1] -> west london
[2] -> excel

could you do this with a regular expression
function ? My main problem is getting the quotes recognised.

Any help much appreciated,
Thanks Ed.

Anon

Is it possible for there to be more than one quoted item in the string? If so, no need to dread regular expressions, since they probably won't work. You may have to break the string apart a character at a time.

Anon

Hi, yes there could be more than one quoted sub string.Could preg_match_all() work ?.

Thanks for the reply,
Ed.

Anon

preg_match_all() could certainly find all the quoted substrings, as long as they didn't have any embedded quotes. Then, if it found some embedded quotes, you could make repeated calls to preg_replace() to wipe the quoted string out of the target string. (You will need to use the 'Ungreedy' modifier for both of these operations.) Finally, the target now contains just the individual words, which you can split() into an array.

Yes, this system will break when there's a mismatched set of quotes or an attemt to escape a double-quote into a quoted string. But so would any other method. The real problem here is that it's harder to find out that this has happened...