Question

I’m trying to figure out a way to parse strings that contain about 3-4 columns of data with variable whitespace between each element. I’d like to split each line into its respective components. Examples are below:

WHITE BLOOD CELL COUNT      10.2        4.0-10.8
HEMOGLOBIN   8.9   ABNORMAL LOW    12-16
PLATELET COUNT     250    160-400

So in the above examples, two lines have three elements, one line has four elements. I want to find a way separate it. If the first element were one word it would be easy, but I don’t see a simple way to do this other than going through each character and matching for either letter or number/period/dash and doing it that way.

Answer 1

Your data can be separated into rows using:

$rows = explode("\n", $str);

Then, for each row, you can split the data by columns using:

foreach($rows as $i => $row){
    $rows[$i] = preg_split ( '/\s{2,}/' , $row);
}

Here is a demonstration: http://codepad.org/BdCHu8PO