Question

I have a text document with a slew of email addresses which I converted from a pdf.
here is an example of of what it looks like:

name1;[e-mail];;;
name2;[e-mail];;;
name3;[e-mail];;;
name4;[e-mail];;;
name5;[e-mail];;;

etc… 600+ contacts

anyone know to to write a simple php pattern/expression/regex I can use to separate the name and email one by one so I can put in database?

the database of course would be a simple: id | contact | email

any help would be gladly appreciated!

I forgot to mention, I would like to do it in php. I will incorporate the code into a form for future usage.

Answer 1

In PHP, you can split a string using the explode function..

$parts = explode(';', $inputString);

The returned array contains each part separated by ;.

For this, each line in your text document has to be given as inputString. So loop through the array returned by

preg_split('/\\n/',$docContent)

and call explode with each element. The above preg_splitreturns an array with each line of the input as an element.

Combining both,

$lines = preg_split('/\\n/',$docContent);
foreach($lines as $line) {
   $parts = explode(';', $line);
   //$parts[0] is name and $parts[1] is email. ignore remaining elements
}

Note : I have only a little knowledge in php. There may be better code.