Regex for Space Separated List

PHP
1

This may be impossible, or I may be special.

So, I basically want to match a pattern where I have one or more space separated values. I’d like to use either preg_match or preg_match_all to get each value, separated.

I can easily get them all together (which I could then split), but is there a way to do it with one call that I’m just missing?

Thanks.

2

Can you give an example string? \s is the space/tab/line break match for perl regular expressions.

3

Basically something like:

“something a b c d”

I would use a pattern like:


preg_match("/something ([^\\s]+)/", $str, $matches);

which would make $matches[1] equal “a b c d”.

I’d like to somehow make it so $matches would contain “a”, “b”, “c”, “d” all separately. I can do it with two matches (making the second just match spaces), but I can’t get it to do it in one.

4

sam,

split() (the opposite of join()) is what you’re looking for. Without removing "something " from the $str, the assignment array will have split[1] = “something” before you get to your meaningful values.

Regards,

DK

5

Thanks DK. I think you mean split[0], but yeah.

My example was overly simplistic, I’d have to do some regex to get that list of space separated values. I can easily split them afterwards (multiple whitespace characters between the values are valid, so I need to use regex to split them as well, since a simple split on " " won’t work).

I was just hoping I could combine those two regex into one some how. =p

6

[fphp]fgetcsv[/fphp] - the 3rd argument can be a space if you want, further down that page are links to similar functions which may help you.

7

I’m not sure, reading your examples, if this is what you’re looking for (but it might be, and if it is… score).


$regex = '/(?<=\\s)\\S+/';
$subject = 'something a b c d';

preg_match_all($regex, $subject, $matches);
var_dump($matches[0]);
8

Uhm… isn’t this more a job for explode? It’s space delimited, blow it apart into an array with explode.


$list=explode(' ',$str);
echo '<pre>',print_r($list),'</pre>';

Hey look, you got an array.

http://php.net/manual/en/function.explode.php

9

The problem is it isn’t required to be single space, it can be any number of whitespace characters (hence using regex to use \s+).