Question

I have the following piece of PHP code for matching a birth year:

$pattern = "/20\d\d/";

$exp = "BORN ON:        Friday, June 11, 2001 ";

$match = preg_match($pattern,$exp, $matches);

echo $matches[0];

This matches "2001"…which is what I am trying to match–the birth year. But this is clearly a hack of a solution and can run into problems if there are other years before $exp for some reason.
How can I include the "BORN ON" information to pick out just the year?

Answer 1

Search also for “BORN ON” and use a capturing group.

$pattern = "/BORN ON.*(20\d\d)\s$/";
$exp = "BORN ON:        Friday, June 11, 2001 ";
$match = preg_match($pattern,$exp, $matches);
echo $matches[1];

I put the Year into a capturing group because of the brackets around it now, you get this group with the $matches[1] (instead of 0). Additionally I bound the year to the end of the string (there can be whitespace \s in between) with the $.