What would be the PHP equivalent of this Perl regex?

Question

What would be the PHP equivalent of this Perl regex?

if (/^([a-z0-9-]+)\s+(\S+)\s+(\S+)\s+(\S+)\s+(\S+)\s+(\S+)\s+(\S+)\s+(\S+)$/
  and $1 ne "global" and $1 ne "") {
    print " <tr>\n";
    print "    <td>$1</td>\n";
    print "    <td>$2</td>\n";
    print "    <td>$3</td>\n";
    print "    <td>$4</td>\n";
    print "    <td>$5</td>\n";
    print "    <td>$6</td>\n";
    print "    <td>$7</td>\n";
    print "    <td>$8</td>\n";
    print " </tr>\n";
}

Answer 1

preg_match

Answer 2

PHP has some functions that work with PCRE. So try this:

if (preg_match('/^([a-z0-9-]+)\s+(\S+)\s+(\S+)\s+(\S+)\s+(\S+)\s+(\S+)\s+(\S+)\s+(\S+)$/', $str, $match) && $match[1] != "global" && $match[1] != "") {
    print " <tr>\n";
    print "    <td>$match[1]</td>\n";
    print "    <td>$match[2]</td>\n";
    print "    <td>$match[3]</td>\n";
    print "    <td>$match[4]</td>\n";
    print "    <td>$match[5]</td>\n";
    print "    <td>$match[6]</td>\n";
    print "    <td>$match[7]</td>\n";
    print "    <td>$match[8]</td>\n";
    print " </tr>\n";
}

Answer 3

I'd suggest that rather than using a regex, you split on whitespace. All you're checking for is eight columns separated by whitespace.

Look at preg_split at http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.preg-split.php. It should look something like:

$fields = preg_split( '/\s+/', $string );
if ( $fields[0] == '...' ) 
...