Question

I am trying to learn regex. I have the string:

$x = "5ft2inches";

How can I read [5,2] into an array using a regex?

Answer 1

If you are assuming that the string will be of the form “{number}ft{number}inches” then you can use preg_match():

preg_match('/(\d+)ft(\d+)inches/', $string, $matches);

(\d+) will match a string of one or more digits. The parentheses will tell preg_match() to place the matched numbers into the $matches variable (the third argument to the function). The function will return 1 if it made a match, of 0 if it didn’t.

Here is what $matches looks like after a successful match:

Array
(
    [0] => 5ft2inches
    [1] => 5
    [2] => 2
)

The entire matched string is the first element, then the parenthesized matches follow. So to make your desired array:

$array = array($matches[1], $matches[2]);