Question

I’m trying to convert a Notepad++ Regex to a PHP regular expression which basically get IDs from a list of URL in this format:

http://www.example.com/category-example/1371937-text-blah-blah-blah-2012.html
http://www.example.com/category-example/1471337-text-blah-blah-2-blah-2010.html

Using Notepad++ regex function i get the output that i need in two steps (a list of comma separated IDs)

(.*)/ replace with space

-(.*) replace with comma

Result:
1371937,1471337

I tried to do something similar with PHP preg_replace but i can’t figure how to get the correct regex, the below example removes everything except digits but it doesn’t work as expected since there can be also numbers that do not belong to ID.

$bb =   preg_replace('/[^0-9]+/', ',', $_POST['Text']);

?>

Which is the correct structure?

Thanks

Answer 1

If all you want to do is find the ID, then you should use preg_match, not preg_replace.

You’ve got lost of options for the pattern, the simplest being:

$url = 'http://www.example.com/category-example/1371937-text-blah-blah-blah-2012.html';
preg_match('/\d+/', $url, $matches);
echo $matches[0];

Which simply finds the first bunch of numbers in the URL. This works for the examples.