Question

I have a list (string) of data that I would like to split into variables using regular expression:

Company Name: Some Company Telephone: [phone] Email: [e-mail]

I would like to get it to:

$company = ‘Some Company’, $phone = ‘[phone]′, $email =’[e-mail]’

Where I am running into problems is the only delimiter is ‘:’ and spaces. I have not started formulating a regex pattern yet. I tried using explode but that was adding the next item onto the last. ie;

$pieces = explode(":", $list);
$pieces[0]  // Company Name
$pieces[1] // Some Company Telephone
...

Answer 1

You can try to split the line with regular expression:

$str = "Company Name: Some Company Telephone: [phone] " .
    "Email: [e-mail]";

list(, $company, $telephone, $email) =
    preg_split("/\s*(?:Company Name|Telephone|Email):\s*/", $str);