Question

How do you split a string based on the number of letter characters and/or the number of numbers so that they are separate strings?

Hopefully this makes sense. Thanks for any help (:

For example:
The user inputs:

1. Henry, Smith ID: 123456

I would like to sort the user input into separate strings with the result of:

$name = 'Henry, Smith';
$ID = '123456';

Answer 1

You can use regex to match only numbers and everything but numbers.

$number = preg_replace("/[^0-9]/", '', $str);
$name = preg_replace("/[0-9]/", '', $str);

Note, for the name, this will return Henry, Smith ID: from your question’s example. This just takes the numbers out… it doesn’t know “ID:” isn’t part of a person’s name.

Explanation of the caret (^):

Inside the brackets it means match everything NOT in the brackets. So [^0-9] matches everything but numbers. In this example, it’ll replace everything that isn’t a number with a blank (second parameter). For the $name, we do the opposite. We replace everything that IS a number with a blank to just get the non-digit characters.

See here for more info on regex.