Question

I have a string that looks like this:

‘p10005c4’

I need to extract the productId 10005 and the colorId 4 from that string into these variables:

$productId
$colorId

productId is > 10000.
colorId > 1.

How can I do this clean and nice using regex?

Answer 1

This should be possible with the following regex:

/p(\d+)c(\d+)/

This basically means, match any string that consists of a p, followed by one or more digits, then followed by a c, then followed by one or more digits.
The parentheses indicate capture groups, and since you want to capture the two ids, they’re surrounded by them.

To use this for your purposes, you’d do something like the following:

$str = 'p10005c4';
$matches = array();

preg_match('/p(\d+)c(\d+)/', $str, $matches);

$productId = $matches[1];
$colorId   = $matches[2];

For more information on getting started with regular expressions, you might want to take a look at Regular-Expressions.info.