Question

I have a string that looks a little like this

1: u:mads g:folk 2: g:andre u:jens u:joren

what I need is a way (I’m guessing by regex) to get for instance u:jens and the number (1 or 2) it is after.

how do I go about this in php (preferably with just one function)?

Answer 1

This will find all matches. If you only need the first, use preg_match instead.

<?php
$subject = '1: u:mads g:folk 2: g:andre u:jens u:joren 3: u:jens';
preg_match_all('#(\d+):[^\d]*?u:jens#msi', $subject, $matches);
foreach ($matches[1] as $match) {
    var_dump($match);
}
?>