Question

I could have these strings:

1. “volume asc, edition desc”
2. “volume ASC, othercolumn desc, columnx DESC”

I want obtain arrays like these:

1. array( ‘volume’, ‘asc’, ‘edition’, ‘desc’ );
2. array( ‘volume’, ‘asc’, ‘othercolumn’, ‘desc’, ‘columnx’, ‘desc’ );

How to reach that with regexp/preg_match functions?

Answer 1

You could use preg_split:

$arr = array(
    "volume asc, edition desc",
    "volume ASC, othercolumn desc, columnx DESC"
);
foreach($arr as $str) {
    $res = preg_split('/[ ,]+/', $str);
    print_r($res);
}

output:

Array
(
    [0] => volume
    [1] => asc
    [2] => edition
    [3] => desc
)
Array
(
    [0] => volume
    [1] => ASC
    [2] => othercolumn
    [3] => desc
    [4] => columnx
    [5] => DESC
)