Question

Given the following string how can I match the entire number at the end of it?

$string = "Conacu P PPL Europe/Bucharest 680979";

I have to tell that the lenght of the string is not constant.

My language of choice is PHP.

Thanks.

Answer 1

You could use a regex with preg_match, like this :

$string = "Conacu P PPL Europe/Bucharest 680979";

$matches = array();
if (preg_match('#(\d+)$#', $string, $matches)) {
    var_dump($matches[1]);
}

And you’ll get :

string '680979' (length=6)

And here is some information:

• The # at the beginning and the end of the regex are the delimiters — they don’t mean anything : they just indicate the beginning and end of the regex ; and you could use whatever character you want (people often use / )
• The ‘$’ at the end of the pattern means “end of the string”
• the () means you want to capture what is between them
  • with preg_match, the array given as third parameter will contain those captured data
  • the first item in that array will be the whole matched string
  • and the next ones will contain each data matched in a set of ()
• the \d means “a number”
• and the + means one or more time

So :

• match one or more number
• at the end of the string

For more information, you can take a look at PCRE Patterns and Pattern Syntax.