php regular expression parse data

Question

I have a field which contain 20 character (pad string with space character from right) like below:

VINEYARD HAVEN MA
BOLIVAR TN
,
BOLIVAR, TN
NORTH TONAWANDA, NY

How can I use regular expression to parse and get data, the result I want will look like this:

[1] VINEYARD HAVEN [2] MA

[1] BOLIVAR [2] TN

[1] , or empty [2] , or empty

[1] BOLIVAR, or BOLIVAR [2] TN or ,TN

[1] NORTH TONAWANDA, or NORTH TONAWANDA [2] NY or ,NY

Currently I use this regex:

^(\D*)(?=[ ]\w{2}[ ]*)([ ]\w{2}[ ]*)

But it couldnot match the line:

,

Please help to adjust my regex so that I match all data above

it's not very clear what do you want to achieve :(

Halayem Anis
– Halayem Anis

2016-02-04 09:34:34 +00:00
Commented Feb 4, 2016 at 9:34 — Halayem Anis
– Halayem Anis, Commented Feb 4, 2016 at 9:34

tomas.lang · Accepted Answer · 2016-02-04 10:49:10Z

1

What about this regex: ^(.*)[ ,](\w*)$ ? You can see working it here: http://regexr.com/3cno7.

Example usage:

<?php

$string = 'VINEYARD HAVEN MA
BOLIVAR TN
,
BOLIVAR, TN
NORTH TONAWANDA, NY';

$lines = array_map('trim', explode("\n", $string));

$pattern = '/^(.*)[ ,](\w*)$/';

foreach ($lines as $line) {
    $res = preg_match($pattern, $line, $matched);

    print 'first: "' . $matched[1] . '", second: "' . $matched[2] . '"' . PHP_EOL;
}

edited Feb 4, 2016 at 10:49

answered Feb 4, 2016 at 9:37

tomas.lang

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3 Comments

Leonhart 27 Over a year ago

just test your regex, it match the ", " line but it didn't parse data for other lines :)

tomas.lang Over a year ago

Here is example working code: sandbox.onlinephpfunctions.com/code/… . How did you use it?

tomas.lang Over a year ago

Site has some maintenance, I added that code to my answer.

symcbean · Accepted Answer · 2016-02-04 09:57:47Z

0

It's probably possible to implement this in a regular expression (try /(.*)\b([A-Z][A-Z])$/ ), however if you don't know how to write the regular expression you'll never be able to debug it. Yes, its worth finding out as a learning exercise, but since we're talking about PHP here (which does have a mechanism for storing compiled REs and isn't often used for bulk data operations) I would use something like the following if I needed to solve the problem quickly and in maintainable code:

$str=trim($str);
if (preg_match("/\b[A-Z][A-Z]$/i", $str, $match)) {
    $state=$match[0];
    $town=trim(substr($str,0,-2)), " ,\t\n\r\0\x0B");
}

edited Feb 4, 2016 at 9:57

answered Feb 4, 2016 at 9:52

symcbean

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