Question

I have a string,

   DXD RO 012345 SMITH JOHN 094 5251 907 REQ 008313 M 

I am trying to extract the phone number, which might have 5-15 digits, with unknown amount of white spaces. Also i need the last letter (sex) and the first name.

what is the exact pattren to do so ?

Answer 1

$subject = "DXD RO 012345 SMITH JOHN 094 5251 907 REQ 008313 M";
$pattern = "/[a-z]+\s+[a-z]+\s+\d+\s+[^\d]+\s*(\d+\s*\d+\s*\d+)\s+[a-z\-]+\s+\d+\s+([a-z])/i";

preg_match($pattern, $subject, $matches);

$matches[1] contains the telephone number and $matches[2] contains the sex.

For this, I assumed that columns 1,2,4,5 and 9 only contain letters, and 3,6,7,8,10 only digits(the sex has to be a letter).

However, if you need to have digits as well as letters, just replace [a-z] or \d with [a-z0-9] for the respective column(\s is whitespace)