Question

I’m a regex newbie, please help me out. The string below occurs in one document:

not_unique\”>20,000 miles under sea

I need to extract the number. The sequence “not_unique” is not unique and may occur in the whole document several times before this sample comes. The part “miles under sea” is unique for the document, can be used as ending delimiter.

I tried something like this in PHP, but it didn’t work for me:

if (preg_match('/(?=.*?miles under sea)(?!.+?not_unique)not_unique/', $document, $regs)) {...}

Please help!

Answer 1

How about something like this?

<?php

$document = "blah blah blah sjhsdijf  not_unique\">20,000 miles under sea</a> jkdjksds  sdsjdlksdsd k skdjsld sd";

//the made optional, also account for 'leagues' instead of miles

preg_match("/([0-9,]{1,6})\s?(miles|leagues)\sunder(\sthe)?\ssea/i", $document, $matches);

print_r($matches);

?>