Question

I use a regex to get a value from a document and store it in a variable called $distance. That is a string, but I have to put it in an int column of a table in a database.

Of course, normally I would go and say

$distance=intval($distance);

But it doesn’t work! I really don’t know why.

This is all I am doing:

preg_match_all($regex,$content,$match);
$distance=$match[0][1];
$distance=intval($distance);

The regex is correct, if I echo $distance, it is e.g. “0” – but I need it to be 0 instead of “0”. Using intval() will somehow always convert it to an empty string.

EDIT 1

The regex is this:

$regex='#<value>(.+?)</value>#'; // Please, I know I shouldn't use regex for parsing XML - but that is not the problem right now

Then I proceed with

preg_match_all($regex,$content,$match);
$distance=$match[0][1];
$distance=intval($distance);

Answer 1

If you’d do print_r($match) you’d see that the array you need is $match[1]:

$content = '<value>1</value>, <value>12</value>';

$regex='#<value>(.+?)</value>#';

preg_match_all($regex,$content,$match);

print_r($match);

Output:

Array
(
    [0] => Array
        (
            [0] => <value>1</value>
            [1] => <value>12</value>
        )

    [1] => Array
        (
            [0] => 1
            [1] => 12
        )

)

---

In this case:

$distance = (int) $match[1][1];

var_dump($distance);

Output: int(12)

---

Alternatively, you can use PREG_SET_ORDER flag, i.e. preg_match_all($regex,$content,$match,$flags=PREG_SET_ORDER);, $match array has this structure:

Array
(
    [0] => Array
        (
            [0] => <value>1</value>
            [1] => 1
        )

    [1] => Array
        (
            [0] => <value>12</value>
            [1] => 12
        )

)