Question

I have a few strings in the following format:

S25 22.087 E152 46.125
S23 32.230 E148 10.576
S25 00.039 E152 12.480
S26 19.496 E152 43.501

I would like to parse the strings and split them into two parts, so:
$foo = ‘S25 22.087 E152 46.125’;

would become:

$foo[0] = 'S25 22.087';
$foo[1] = 'E152 46.125';

(it doesn’t have to be in an array, two new variables would also work fine).

How can this be done? I’d prefer to have a regexp use rather than finding the posing of E and doing a substr().

Answer 1

S25 22.087 E152 46.125 to me looks like a latitude and longitude position value. So you should also expect N25 22.087 W152 46.125 and be able to parse that as well.

$foo = 'S25 22.087 E152 46.125';
$matches = array();
if (preg_match('/^([NS].*)\s([EW].*)$/', $foo, $matches)) {
    var_dump($matches); // $matches[1] = 'S25 22.087'; $matches[2] = 'E152 46.125'
}