preg_split or not preg_split, that is the question!

[Northern Monkey]

Morning All,

Yet another topic on the keyword tracking topic. I have a string of words e.g.

"holiday villa in", essex, "united kingdom"

I need to split the string into an array so that the quoted words stay together e.g.

Array 0 => Holiday villa in
1 => essex
2 => United Kingdom

Any ideas? I thought about using preg_split but wonder if there is a better tool?

Cheers,

NM.

[dmorison]

If it's not too long a list, I would just do an explode() followed by trim() supplying the quote character as an optional character to trim; for example:

PHP Code:

<?php
  $keyword_list = '"holiday villa in",essex,"united kingdom"';
  $keyword_array = explode(",",$keyword_list);
  foreach($keyword_array as $k => $v) $keyword_array[$k] = trim($v,'"');
  print_r($keyword_array);
?>

gives...

Array ( [0] => holiday villa in [1] => essex [2] => united kingdom )

[Northern Monkey]

Sounds good, potentially I could have a lot of keywords but that does the trick for now.

Many Thanks,

NM.

[Rich]

You may need to watch out if you have any commas inside you quoted strings, e.g.

PHP Code:

$keyword_list = '"holiday, villa",essex,"united kingdom"'; 


would list holiday and villa separately.

There is quite a bit of discussion about that problem in the comments to the explode manual page.

If you won't have commas inside the quoted strings then

PHP Code:

$keyword_list = '"holiday villa in",essex,"united kingdom"';
$keyword_array = explode(",",str_replace('"','',$keyword_list));
print_r($keyword_array); 


will probably be a bit quicker.

[esnagel]

Look at http://us2.php.net/fgetcsv - sounds like it's exactly what you're looking for. Handles the , inside "", too

[trevHCS]

One other possible is preg_match_all() which might work if the CSV processor doesn't work (incase it doesn't like the lack of quotes on "essex".

Trev

[Marc Gear]

This is just why you should use XML

[trevHCS]

Is that XML with or without attributes in every tag, DTD's and all the rest of the strange stuff that sometimes goes with it?

Trev

[Marc Gear]

Originally Posted by trevHCS Is that XML with or without attributes in every tag, DTD's and all the rest of the strange stuff that sometimes goes with it? Trev

XML with attributes, schemas, namespaces and all sorts of crazy stuff.

If only people used the right tools no one would ever complain about XML