How to extract parts using regular expression in PHP? - php

Question

For example you have the following string:
$text = "word1:text1#atpart/foo/do/myfood$textfinal";
The function will work like:
$parts = array();
extract( $regular_exp, $text, $parts );
In the parts array we will get this:
$parts[0] = "word1";
$parts[1] = "text1";
$parts[2] = "atpart";
$parts[3] = "/foo/do/myfood";
$parts[4] = "textfinal";
Thanks!

Answer 1

This may not be what you are after, but the format you show looks almost like a URL with a username:password#domain authentication in front. If you can get the last $ to be served as a ?, it might be an idea to use parse_url() to parse it.
$string = "word1:text1#atpart/foo/do/myfood?textfinal"; // notice the ?
$string = "none://".$string; // We need to add a protocol for this to work
print_r (parse_url($string));
Result:
Array (
[scheme] => none
[host] => atpart
[user] => word1
[pass] => text1
[path] => /foo/do/myfood
[query] => textfinal )
the advantage of this would be that it's pretty flexible if one or more parts can be missing in the incoming data. If that's not an issue, a regex may be more convenient.

Answer 2

try
$parts = preg_split('/[:#\$]+/', $text);

Answer 3

Without more details, this matches the proposed example:
preg_match('#(.*?):(.*?)#(.*?)(/.*?)\$(.*)#', $text, $parts);
note that you will get the parts starting at index 1 instead of 0.

Answer 4

$delims=':#$';
$word = strtok('word1:text1#atpart/foo/do/myfood$textfinal',$delims);
while ( $word!==false ) {
foreach( explode('/',$word,2) as $tmp){
$words[]=$tmp;
}
$word = strtok($delims);
}
var_dump($words);
On one hand this is probably overkill. On the other hand, this may be more flexible depending on how different the string can be.
Demo: http://codepad.org/vy5b9yX7
Docs: http://php.net/strtok