Question

I’m using PHP’s preg_match_all() to search a string imported using file_get_contents(). The regex returns matches but I would like to know at which line number those matches are found. What’s the best technique to achieve this?

I could read the file as an array and perform the regex for each line, but the problem is that my regex matches results across carriage returns (new lines).

Answer 1

well it’s kinda late, maybe you alrady solved this, but i had to do it and it’s fairly simple.
using PREG_OFFSET_CAPTURE flag in preg_match will return the character position of the match.
lets assume $charpos, so

list($before) = str_split($content, $charpos); // fetches all the text before the match

$line_number = strlen($before) - strlen(str_replace("\n", "", $before)) + 1;

voilá!