Question

I have a large text containing many dates formatted like this:

 10 april 2012, monday

I need to transform all of them into this format:

 \r\nmonday, 10 april 2012

So, I wrote a regex and it works perfectly OK.

 $matches1= preg_replace(
 '#(\d{,2} [a-z]+) \d{4}, (sunday|monday|tuesday|wednesday|thursday|friday|saturday)#u', 
 "\r\n$2$3$4$5$6$7$8, $1", 
 $txt);

The problem is that I also need to save all the transformed parts of the text matching the replacement pattern – “\r\n$2$3$4$5$6$7$8, $1” (like \r\nmonday, 10 april 2012) – into an array. So that I have something like this:

 Array('\r\nmonday, 10 april 2012', '\r\ntuesday, 11 april 2012', '\r\nfriday, 14 april 2012' etc.)

Is that possible?

Replacement pattern (“\r\n$2$3$4$5$6$7$8, $1”) comes from a html form and may vary.

Update

I’ve tried to write a callback function but I couldn’t get the result I needed.
So I’ve come up with the following:

 $text = ...;//some text
 $search = ...;//search pattern
 $replacement = ...;//replacement pattern

 preg_match_all('#' . $search. '#u', $text, $matches, PREG_SET_ORDER);

 foreach ($matches as $match) 
 {
     $replacements[] = preg_replace('#' . $search. '#u', $replacement, $match[0]);
 }

 $newtext = preg_replace('#' . $search. '#u', $replacement, $text);

So $newtext contains the transformed text and $replacenemts contains all the replacements.

Answer 1

Use preg_replace_callback instead (or exemplary in the following code-example additionally) and keep track of all replacements:

$search =  '#(\d{,2} [a-z]+) \d{4}, (sunday|monday|tuesday|wednesday|thursday|friday|saturday)#u';
$replace = "\r\n$2$3$4$5$6$7$8, $1";
$captured = array();

preg_replace_callback($search, function($matches) use (&$captured)  {
    $captured[] = $matches;    
}, $txt);

$matches1= preg_replace($search, $replace, $txt);