Question

I had multiple patterns (“=”,”<“,”>”,”!=”,”>=”,”<=”) that I needs to check for random strings supplied by user. I also needs to find the position of occurrence of this pattern.
User supplied string format will be like this

"Name =" 
"Age >"
"date<="

Basically, I needs to separate the field name and these patterns, so it output like.

"Name" and "=" 
"Age" and ">" 
"date" and "<=" 

Please not that there can be any number of spaces between field Name and age.

Right now, I am doing these, by first removing space and then matching for each
of patterns one by one using strpos and if matches, then I separate it by using
the position from strpos to get 2 substr.

Is there any better way to do this?

Answer 1

If your field name can’t containt special characters, which you use for patterns, it’s not very hard. Something like this should do the trick (might need a little testing before use):

preg_match("#([^=<>!]+)\s*([=<>!]+)#", trim($string), $matches);
echo $matches[1] . ' and ' . $matches[2];

This, however, will extract only the field name and pattern, this won’t tell you the “position” of the pattern.

P.S. To get a position, if you need it that badly, you can then use $position = strpos($string, $matches[2]);

And if you want to make sure user can only supply the patterns allowed, you can specify them manualy and expression will look something like this: #([^=<>!]+)\s*(=|<|>|(!=)|(>=)|(<=))#