Question

I have a string variable named $message as below:

        * Time Stamp: 2012-12-03 16:36:04 
        * Speed: 7 km/h 
        * Heading: 356 deg (N) 
        * Event ID: -48 
        * Event Desc: .Arrived at Inbound Receiving 
        * Event Value: -56
        * Event Value Type: 0

I then try to extract the event and timestamp values from the variable with the below code:

$event = null;
$lines = explode(PHP_EOL, $message);
foreach($lines as $line) {
  // skip empty lines
  if(strlen($line) == 0) {
    continue;
  }
  $tokens = explode(':', $line);
  // tokens[0] contains the key , e.g. Event Value
  // tokens[1]~[N] contains the value (where N is the number of pieces), e.g. -56
  // stitch token 1 ~ N
  $key = $tokens[0]; 
  unset($tokens[0]);
  $val = implode(': ', $tokens);
  // do your extra logic here, e.g. set $event variable to value
  if(strpos($key, 'Event Desc') > -1) {
    $event = $val;
  }
   if(strpos($key, 'Time Stamp') > -1) {
   $time = $val;
  }
}

This works great, only problem is that the returned values are:

.Arrived at Arrived at Inbound Receiving =

2012-12-03 16:36:04  =

Where does the equal sign come from and how can I remove it along with the trailing spaces?

my expected result would be:

.Arrived at Arrived at Inbound Receiving

and

2012-12-03 16:36:04

This is how it appears in the string variable.
Thanks as always.

Answer 1

You can try

preg_match_all("/ ([a-z ]+):([a-z0-9:\-. ]+)/i", $string,$match);
$values = array_combine($match[1], $match[2]) ;

echo $values['Time Stamp'] ,PHP_EOL ;
echo $values['Speed'] ,PHP_EOL ;
echo $values['Heading'] ,PHP_EOL ;
echo $values['Event Desc'] ,PHP_EOL ;
// .... etc

Output

 2012-12-03 16:36:04 
 7 km
 356 deg 
 .Arrived at Inbound Receiving  

Online Demo