Question

I hope someone can help me. I need to extract certain details (“Full Name and Surname”, “Email”, “Contact Number) from a MySQL DB but can’t figure out how to do this. The application in question, “Grunion Contact Form” for WordPress saves the data in the DB, in an array, as follows:

Array
(
    [Full Name and Surname:] => Sharon Somerset
    [Email] => sharon@x.x.x
    [Contact Number:] => 08xxxxxx
    [Alternative Number] => 011xxxxxx
    [Please list convenient time to be contacted] => 
    [Medical Aid Quote] => Yes
    [Insurance Quote] => 
    [Policy Update] => 
    [Friend's Name and Surname:] => 
    [Friend's Contact Number:] => 
    [How did you find us?] => Google
)

Each entry is in it’s own database row, inside “longtext” field.

How can I easily extract “Full Name and Surname”, “Email”, “Contact Number” data from a few thousands rows like this, and re-save in a simple table or CSV file to import into something like phplist

Answer 1

This should get you started – its simple regular expression matching on the text field. This will take a while to run through – but it does what you need.

<?php
$string = "Array
(
    [Full Name and Surname:] => Sharon Somerset
    [Email] => sharon@x.x.x
    [Contact Number:] => 08xxxxxx
    [Alternative Number] => 011xxxxxx
    [Please list convenient time to be contacted] => 
    [Medical Aid Quote] => Yes
    [Insurance Quote] => 
    [Policy Update] => 
    [Friend's Name and Surname:] => 
    [Friend's Contact Number:] => 
    [How did you find us?] => Google
)";


$string = preg_replace("/Array\n\(\n/","",$string);
//remove first line

$string = preg_replace("/\)$/","",$string);
//remove last line

$lines = explode("\n",$string);
//split on new lines
print_r($lines);

foreach($lines as $l)
{
        preg_match("/\[(.+)\] => (.*)$/",$l,$matches);
        //$matches[1] will contain the label
        //$matches[2] will contain the value
        print_r($matches);

}
?>