Question

I have a regexp I’m using with sed, but now I need to make it work in PHP also. I can’t use system calls as they are disabled.

 $ cat uglynumber.txt: Ticket number : 303905694, FOO:BAR:BAR: Some text Case ID:123,456,789:Foobar - Some other text 303867970;[FOOBAR] Some text goes here Case Ref: 303658850 - Some random text here - host.tld #78854w 

 $ cat uglynumbers.txt | sed 's/[, ]//g;s/.*\([0-9]\{9\}\).*/\1/g' 303905694 123456789 303867970 303658850 

So, how to do the same with PHP?

I found one example like this, but I can’t inject that regexp into that.

 if (preg_match('/.../', $line, $matches)) {   echo 'Match was found';   echo $matches[0]; } 

Answer 1

Your specific SED example is obviously 2 regular expressions, 1 being replacing the commas, and one being technically grabbing the 9 digit continuous numbers.

The first half of your SED string is best fit with the preg_replace() function.

//`sed s/regex/replace_value/flags`  preg_replace('/regex/flags', 'replace_value', $input); 

The second half of your SED string would be a preg_match_all():

//`sed ...;s/regex/\1/flags`  $matches_array = array(); preg_match_all('/regex/flags', $input, &$matches_array); 

So your specific code will look something like:

<?php $input = file_get_contents('uglynumbers.txt');  $input = preg_replace('/[, ]/m','', $input);  $matches = array(); //No need for the .* or groupings, just match all occurrences of [0-9]{9} if( preg_match_all('/[0-9]{9}/m', $input, $matches) ) {     //...     var_dump($matches); } 

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It looks like g is an SED modifier meaning match all lines. preg_match_all() should already takes care of this modifier but m seems like an appropriate replacement as per the manual on PCRE modifiers.