PHP RegEx for the following string [closed] - php

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I have this string.
130003 lebtro is cool 609664 trochanter2 460936 bibi95 410635 MrRadical38 206311 Labonte 577767 thebanzaikid 569248 marco 355894 Armored_J 630259 SNEG323 569014 llama 501235 plummer 305212 lonefish 294268 dragonbleed 399281 Stelomat 619909 McPred 22733 Storykeeper 634691 The Max 504980 MrFrench 248285 Darkshadow2013 647361 Cain
And I want to be able to parse so the numbers followed by the letters like this:
130003 lebtro is cool<br>
609664 trochanter2<br>
460936 bibi95<br>
410635 MrRadical38<br>
206311 Labonte<br>
...<br>
...<br>
...<br>
647361 Cain
Would I need to use a RegEx in PHP or is there any other way to do it?

Answer 1

Here's a regex solution:
\b(\d+)\s+(.+?(?=\s+\d|$))
Demo
You can use this with preg_match_all. Each match will contain the number in the first group and the value in the second group.
Something like this should do the job:
preg_match_all('#\b(\d+)\s+(.+?(?=\s+\d|$))#', $input, $matches, PREG_SET_ORDER);
// $matches[0][1] == "130003"
// $matches[0][2] == "lebtro is cool"
// $matches[1][1] == "609664"
// $matches[2][2] == "trochanter2"
With this solution, any whitespace-separated number is considered as an entry start. If all your numbers are 6 digits, then replace \d+ with \d{6} (or \d{6,} for at least 6 digits).

Answer 2

with preg_split:
$result = preg_split('~\s*\b(?=[0-9])~', $str, -1, PREG_SPLIT_NO_EMPTY);
or more waterproof:
$result = preg_split('~(?:\s|\A)\s*(?=[0-9])~', $str, -1, PREG_SPLIT_NO_EMPTY);
or a why not pattern:
$result = preg_split('~(?:\s+|\A\s*)(*SKIP)(?=[0-9])~', $str, -1, PREG_SPLIT_NO_EMPTY);
Without regex:
$elts = explode(' ', $str);
$result = array();
$tmp = '';
foreach ($elts as $elt) {
if (ctype_digit($elt)) {
if ($tmp) $result[] = $tmp;
$tmp = $elt;
} else
$tmp .= ' ' . $elt;
}
$result[] = $tmp;