Question

I’m trying to split a string by non-alphanumeric delimiting characters AND between alternations of digits and non-digits. The end result should be a flat array of consisting of alphabetic strings and numeric strings.

I’m working in PHP, and would like to use REGEX.

Examples:

• ES-3810/24MX should become ['ES', '3810', '24', 'MX']
• CISCO1538M should become ['CISCO' , '1538', 'M']

The input file sequence can be indifferently DIGITS or ALPHA.

The separators can be non-ALPHA and non-DIGIT chars, as well as a change between a DIGIT sequence to an APLHA sequence, and vice versa.

Answer 1

The command to match all occurrances of a regex is preg_match_all() which outputs a multidimensional array of results. The regex is very simple… any digit ([0-9]) one or more times (+) or (|) any letter ([A-z]) one or more times (+). Note the capital A and lowercase z to include all upper and lowercase letters.

The textarea and php tags are inluded for convenience, so you can drop into your php file and see the results.

<textarea style="width:400px; height:400px;">
<?php

foreach( array(
        "ES-3810/24MX",
        "CISCO1538M",
        "123ABC-ThatsHowEasy"
    ) as $string ){

    // get all matches into an array
    preg_match_all("/[0-9]+|[[:upper:][:lower:]]+/",$string,$matches);

    // it is the 0th match that you are interested in...
    print_r( $matches[0] );

}

?>
</textarea>

Which outputs in the textarea:

Array
(
    [0] => ES
    [1] => 3810
    [2] => 24
    [3] => MX
)
Array
(
    [0] => CISCO
    [1] => 1538
    [2] => M
)
Array
(
    [0] => 123
    [1] => ABC
    [2] => ThatsHowEasy
)