Question

First of all, regular expressions are quite possibly the most confusing thing I have every dealt with – with that being said I cannot believe how efficient they can make ones life.

So I am trying to understand the wildcard regex with no luck

Need to turn

f_firstname
f_lastname
f_dob       
f_origincountry 
f_landing  

Into

':f_firstname'=>$f_firstname,
':f_lastname'=>$f_lastname,
':f_dob'=>$f_dob,
':f_origincountry'=>$f_origincountry,   
':f_landing'=>$f_landing,

In the answer can you please briefly describe the regex you are using, I have been reading the tutorials but they boggle my mind. Thanks.

Answer 1

Edit: As Chris points out, you can improve the regex by cleaning up any white space there may be in the target string. I also replace the dot with \w as he did because it’s better practice than using the .

Search: ^f_(\w+)\s*$
^     # start at the beginning of the line
f_    # look for f_
(\w+) # capture in a group all characters
\s*   # optionally skip over (don't capture) optional whitespace
$     # end of the line

Replace: ':f_\1'=>$f_\1,
':f_    # beginning of replacement string
\1      # the group of characters captured above
'=>$f_  # some more characters for the replace
\1,     # the capture group (again)