getting text from string with regex

Question

I have the following string:

         Apples Bananas Oranges
Me       1      2       3  
Brother  4      4       5

I need a regular expression to get number of apples, bananas and oranges each of us "me and my brother" has.

please help me, I'm totally clueless here.

Is this homework? Because you should never be doing this IRL. — Evan Mulawski
– Evan Mulawski, Commented May 15, 2012 at 21:40
Are Me and Brother hard-coded, or are you looking for a more general solution? — McGarnagle
– McGarnagle, Commented May 15, 2012 at 21:40
this is not a homework thats for sure, the real string values is different from this, but I added that for fun factor. no @dragon there is no markup on this table, its just a chunk of a bigger string — saadlulu
– saadlulu, Commented May 15, 2012 at 21:51
The only way a regular expression (or any simple parser) is going to work is if your data is in some consistent format .. is it? Or is creating code to parse only the provided example sufficient? — Explosion Pills
– Explosion Pills, Commented May 15, 2012 at 21:54

AD7six · Accepted Answer · 2012-05-15 22:15:51Z

2

You probably want some code like this:

$string = file('input.txt');
$headers = array();
$results = array();
foreach($string as $i => $line) {
    preg_match_all('@(\w+)@', $line, $matches);
    if (!$i) {
        $headers = $matches[0];
    } else {
        $name = array_shift($matches[0]);
        $results[$name] = array_combine($headers, $matches[0]);
    }   
}   
print_r($results);

which would result in:

Array
(   
    [Me] => Array
        (   
            [Apples] => 1
            [Bananas] => 2
            [Oranges] => 3
        )   

    [Brother] => Array
        (   
            [Apples] => 4
            [Bananas] => 4
            [Oranges] => 5
        )   

)

answered May 15, 2012 at 22:15

AD7six

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2 Comments

saadlulu Over a year ago

great, it works if the text was inside of a file, but i cant do that. it has to be a string.

AD7six Over a year ago

well, that's a trivial change which I'll leave for you saadlulu ;)

MiDri · Accepted Answer · 2012-05-15 21:53:16Z

0

Roughly

$regexp = "/([\w]+) +([\d]+) +([\d]+) +([\d]+)/";
$matches = array();
preg_match($regexp, $yourDataSet, $matches);

Depending on if you are using 1 long string or a string with newlines you can add \n before the last / in the regexp and make it more precise.

answered May 15, 2012 at 21:53

MiDri

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