Grabbing ASCII Text & Assiging to Variables

[rweiss]

Hiyas, I recently finished a simple database to store item information for a game I play, and am trying to make it easier for users to submit new items. I've been looking around but can't find anything on this topic. Is it possible to have a text field on a form, so a user can just copy and paste a snippet of something, and take parts of the text and assign them to variables?

For more clarification, I just want to be able to copy and paste this into a text field:


Glass Bracers
-=-=-=- Worn Armour Evaluation -=-=-=-

Edged: Ineffective Electric: Pathetic
Blunt: Ineffective Mind: Pathetic
Fire: Flimsy Energy: Pathetic
Ice: Flimsy Poison: Pathetic
Acid: Pathetic Radiation: Pathetic
============================================

(The items in bold will be assigned to variables upon form submit)


Could anyone point me to a direction where I could quickly accomplish this?
(website: www.3karmour.ssxh.net)

Thanks.

[petesmc]

Have a look a regular expression matching (preg_match), this should help you out.

-Peter

[352Hosting-com]

thanks petesmc!

[rweiss]

Thanks a lot for the info, I've been delving into it and it's exactly what I need, but I'm having a real hard time matching the patterns. I've been doing some reading on pattern modifiers but am really confused. How would I grab the item name and Edged rating if the output were like this:

Item Name
-=-=-=- Worn Armour Evaluation -=-=-=-

Edged: Rating

I need to assign 'Item name' to the $name variable, and 'Rating' to the variable $edged. So far I've got:

preg_match("/^(?)Edged:(?)^/", $description, $matches);
$name = $matches[1];
$edged = $matches[2]; 

As you can see I am completely stumped on the syntax of pattern modifiers. Could anyone please help?