Question

i have a string:

$string = "test1 - test2 - kw: test - key: 123 - test5";

and im trying to get this result:

kw = test;
key = 123;

I’ve tried spiting the string:

$array = explode("-", $str );
print_r($array);

and the result is:

Array
(
    [0] =>  test1 
    [1] =>  test2
    [2] =>  kw: test
    [3] =>  key: 123
    [4] =>  test5
)

from here i would like to do something like:

$str = 'kw:';
if ( in_array ( $str , $array ) ) {
    echo 'It exists';
} else {
    echo 'Does not exist';
}

or

$kw = array_search('kw:', $array ); 

but $array is an arrays of array.

im not sure how to proceed from here.

any ideas? Is there another way of extracting those words?

thanks

Answer 1

Using preg_match this becomes really easy:

$string = "test1 - test2 - kw: test - key: 123 - test5";
$results = preg_match('/.*?(kw: (.*?) - )(key: (.*?) -).*/', $string, $matches);
var_dump($matches);

Should return an array of matches that correspond to what you are looking for…

array(5) {
  [0]=>
  string(43) "test1 - test2 - kw: test - key: 123 - test5"
  [1]=>
  string(11) "kw: test - "
  [2]=>
  string(4) "test"
  [3]=>
  string(10) "key: 123 -"
  [4]=>
  string(3) "123"
}

For more information regarding regular expressions (Very powerful tool):

http://www.regular-expressions.info/tutorial.html