Regular expression syntax In PHP to extract all instances of a format.

Question

I am attempting to extract all instances of a particular format from a string:

I am wondering if my new Sony [PT# 123456ABC; Sony] has this feature but my friend says the new Toshiba [PT# AD-3232hjk; Toshiba] has this feature.

I would like to extract:

[PT# 123456ABC; Sony]

[PT# AD-3232hjk; Toshiba]

As you can see here, the only items in the consistent positions are:

• [PT#
• ;
• ]

I was attempting to use various types of strpos() but because of the varying lengths and formats of the part numbers and manufacturer names I was unable to reliably pull out those instances from a much larger string. I have been trying various ways to use regular expressions to solve this however my knowledge with them is fairly limited. After I have these expressions extracted and placed into variables I will then need to separate the part numbers and manufacturer names from the expression. This may also be easier to accomplish using regular expressions.

Any help is appreciated. Thanks

Answer 1

I think this would do it

preg_match_all( "/(\[PT#\s+.*?;\s+.*?\])/", $input, $matches );

print_r( $matches );

Altternatively, if you just wanted to capture the unique information

preg_match_all( "/\[PT#\s+(.*?);\s+(.*?)\]/", $input, $matches );

Answer 2

I take it you'll be reading from a text file containing a lot of those entries. What you can do is:

preg_match_all("/\[PT#(.*?);[.*]?(.*?)\]/i", $text, $result);

it will put all matches into the array $result and you can access them as so:

echo $result[1][0]; //echos first occurrence's serial

$result is sorted column major and the first entry into a match is the complete match string

echo $result[0][0]; // would print [PT# 123456ABC; Sony]
echo $result[1][0]; // would print 123456ABC
echo $result[2][0]; // would print Sony

Hope that helps

EDIT: fixed the regex, should work now (still untested)

Answer 3

$matches = array();
preg_match_all( "/\[PT#([^\];]+);([^\]]+)\]/", $input, $matches,  PREG_SET_ORDER);

foreach ($matches as $match) {
  echo "id=", trim($match[1]), " brand=", trim($match[2]), "\n";
}