How to find something in a string

Hey,

Sorry i'm a little green in php as i have coded in asp classic before and it's really not the same

I have e.g 3 strings containing the following text:

$str1 = "is simply dummy text of the printing $$ 6/4r $$ and typesetting industry"
$str2 = "is simply dummy text of the printing $$ 11/11tr $$ and typesetting industry"
$str3 = "is simply dummy text of the printing $$ 15/6 $$ and typesetting industry"

How can i get 6/4r, 11/11tr and 15/6 out in seperate variables?

1. I think it something like search for '$$'
2. Ask, is the next char a space?
3. Ask, is the next char a number?
4. Ask, is the next char a '/'

When all these are true i want to grab e.g 6/4r out and put it in a separate var, but i don't know how to do it in php.

Can anybody help me?

Thanks!

 

I think you can do it with regular expressions and the preg_match function

preg_match

http://php.net/manual/en/function.preg-match.php

Code (markup):

Regular Expression tutorial

http://www.zytrax.com/tech/web/regex.htm

Code (markup):

 

Thanks GMF, i have looked at php.net and the preg-match without luck, but let me try the other link at zytax.com

Would be nice with some code example if possible.

 

You have to use BOTH

preg_match is a function that uses Regular expressions to search a string

On php.net there are code examples

Preg_match works as followed

preg_match( ###SEARCH PATTERN###, ###STRING WHICH NEEDS TO SEARCHED###, ###ARRAY THAT SAFES THE MATCHES IF FOUND###);

 

Yes there is code, but it's useless for a beginners with all this '\\ //\\|?', you probably know what i mean

Thanks for explaining the preg_match.

I will try some coding now and get back later.

 

Yes, I do know what you mean

I would have posted the regex you needed, but I am not very good with it. But I think the regex you need is not that hard.

 

The RegEx you need is something like this:
/\$\$ ([^\$]+) \$\$/

I can recommend the following website, when working with regular expressions: http://rubular.com/

 

GMF & Soulstone,

This is how the code should look like and it works for me.

Using regex:

$str = 'is simply dummy text of the printing $$ 6/4r $$ and typesetting industr';
preg_match('|\$\$(.*)\$\$|',$str,$match);
echo $match[1];

PHP:

Using explode:

$pieces = explode(' $$ ', $str);
//Should contain 6/4r
echo $pieces[1]

PHP:

Using preg-match as a function:

function getValue($str){
    $pattern = '/\$\$\s*([^\$\s]+)\s*\$\$/i';
    if(preg_match($pattern, $str, $match)){
        return $match[1];
    }
    return false;
}
 
echo getValue($str);

PHP:

Soulstone! If you can, please explain to me and others how all this crab code works /\$\$\s*([^\$\s]+)\s*\$\$/i

I might have another problem though, but i'll get back to that later.

Thanks for your help!

 

If you use preg_match_all, you can match multiple results in a string.
The regular expression needs a "boundary" to begin with, I use /. So the regex must start and end with /.
Backslash is an "escape" character. $ has a specific meaning in regular expressions, so to actually use the character $ you need to escape it with \ infront.
Everything between parentheses will be "captured" in the resulting array.
Square brackets indicate the characters allowed, or disallowed if you have [^ ] as the case I wrote.
After the last slash, you put an 'i' which means the match should be case-insensitive. It doesn't really make any difference in your case though, since you're not trying to match any letters.

Was that the kind of explaination you needed?

 

Try doing something like this:

<?php
$str = 'is simply dummy text of the printing $$ 6/4r $$ and typesetting industry is simply dummy text of the printing $$ 11/11tr $$ and typesetting industry';
$pattern = '/\$\$ ([^\$]+) \$\$/i';
preg_match_all($pattern, $str, $match);


echo '<pre>'.print_r($match, true).'</pre>';
?>

PHP:

Should give you some answers about what it does.

 

Yes i see how it works. I will re-read your comment later again to see if i understand.

 

Yeah sort of, but i don't understand the escape thing.

Escape from what?

If this is disallowed [^ ] then i don't understand the $. This would mean that $ sign are disallowed or what? ([^\$]+) and what about the '+' sign?

 

Escape from the actual "meaning". $ normally means the end of a string in regex. It's a has a specific function. If you want the actual character, you need to "escape it" from the normal meaning.
[^\$]+ means "at least one character that is not $". The + sign means "one or more of" and [^$] means "everything but $". It could have been [^abc] which means "everything but a, b and c".
The point of it is to allow anything between the two sections of $$, so you can have "$$ anything here except dollar-sign $$", and it would be a match.
You do this, because else the result of "$$ something $$ other things $$ something $$" with .+ instead of [^\$]+ would be the exact string, since it would match the last occurence of $$.

 

I suggest you should look at http://rubular.com/ at the bottom, there's a quick-reference at the bottom, that will show some of the built-in "functions" in Regular Expressions. Example . (dot) means "any single character". So if you do .+ it means "at least one of any single character".

 

Thank you Soulstone for the explanation and i will take a look at that site. Thanks!

 

You're welcome! There's tons of tutorials etc. online if you google for it. Regular Expressions are very powerful and can be used for a lot of things.

 

using substring or regular expression. Two ways to accomplice the task.

 

substr() does not match a pattern, it truncates a string to a given length.

 

You can use substr in a combination with strpos though.

 

I know you could, but why would you take the long way around? Also, he made no mention of strpos().