Question

I have a sample code:

$text = "240 x 400 pixels, 3.0 inches (~155 ppi pixel density)";

And using regex:

preg_match_all('/(.*)( x )(.*)/i', $text, $arr);

print_r($arr[0]);

Result not change, how to fix it ?

Answer 1

I’m guessing you want to change your regular expression to something like this:

preg_match_all('/(\d+) x (\d+)/i', $text, $arr);

The “.” matches any character, so when you used .* it just matched the whole string—it doesn’t matter what you put after it. With regular expressions, it’s generally a good rule of thumb to be as specific as possible. In this case \d+ will match 1 or more numeric digits, so it will stop matching when it gets to the first non-numeric digit, in this case, a space.

Here’s the result of $arr that I get with your $text string and the updated regular expression:

Array
(
    [0] => Array
        (
            [0] => 240 x 400
        )

    [1] => Array
        (
            [0] => 240
        )

    [2] => Array
        (
            [0] => 400
        )

)

Hopefully it’s closer to what you were looking for.