Question

I am looking for a function that suits the following situation.

What the script does:
It retrieves the server.log from a minecraft server, and breaks it into sections from user chats, to server notifications etc.

I have an array containing the users information, it is set by another file called users.yml
and it is converted to an array like so

$userconfig = array(
    'TruDan'    => array(
        'prefix'    => '&3',
        'suffix'    => '&e',
    ),
    'TruGaming' => array(
        'prefix'    => '&c',
        'suffix'    => '&f',
    ),
    'PancakeMiner'  => array(
        'prefix'    => '&c',
        'suffix'    => '&f',
    ),
    'Teddybear952'  => array(
        'prefix'    => '&b',
        'suffix'    => '&f',
    ),
);

What i want to do, is search the $line from server.log (it loops through lines) for a username above (array key) and return the array. so i can then parse $ret[‘prefix’] and $ret[‘suffix’]

mc.php (the file) http://pastebin.com/9geyfuup
server.log (partial, the actual thing is 12,000 lines long, so i took a few lines from it) http://pastebin.com/DKz8YfgK

Answer 1

If you’re using preg_match() to search each line for a username, make sure you first sort the list of usernames in reverse order using rsort():

$users = array_map('preg_quote', array_keys($userconfig));
rsort($users);
$pattern = '/' . implode('|', $users); . '/';
if preg_match($pattern, $line, $matches) {
    return matches[0];
}
else {
    return array();
}

If you search a line for the pattern "/TruDan|TruDan123/" the search will match a line containing "TruDan123" to the shorter version "TruDan" because it was specified first in the pattern. Sorting the user list in reverse order ensures that the pattern will be "/TruDan123|TruDan/" and so give preference to the longer match.