Question

I have PHP strings like

$str1 = "hello ... this is the rest of the line"

or

$str1 = "ASDFDF ... this is also the rest of the line";

I am trying to right a regex statement that will extract the text after “…” appears in the string. I am not able to do this reliably..

so in the above cases, i want to…

 $extract = "this is the rest of the line";

… you get the point.

Answer 1

There are multiple ways to do it.

Using strpos and substr:

function rest_of_line($line){
  $loc = strpos($line, '...');
  if($loc !== FALSE){
      return substr($line, $loc+3);
  }
  return $line;
}

$str1 = "hello ... this is the rest of the line";
$str2 = "ASDFDF ... this is also the rest of the line";
echo rest_of_line($str1);
echo rest_of_line($str2);

Or using explode:

$rest = explode('...', $str1, 2); // the 2 ensures that only the first occurrence of ... actually matters.
echo $rest[1]; // you should probably check whether there actually was a match or not