Question

I’m using this method:

$matches;
preg_match('/^days:\s(.*)$/', $line, $matches);
if (count($matches) > 1)
  return explode('; ', $matches[1]);
return array();

On a file with lines like:

days: Monday; Thursday; Friday,

And the first result (in the example, Monday), always comes with the “days:” part added on, like this:

array[0](
  myObject=>object
  (
    visitors[0]=>array //notice "visitors" is the problem.  It should be "days".
    (
      [0]=>days: Monday
      [1]=>Thursday
      [2]=>Friday
    )
  )
)

I thought regex was supposed to return what’s inside the brackets (())?

Answer 1

As nickb pointed out, your code seems to run just fine. Perhaps when you hand-wrote it in you actually fixed an issue that’s in production code. Or the bug you are seeing may be a result of something else that’s happening in another part of your code.

This is what I get when I run

$line = "days: Monday; Thursday; Friday";
preg_match('/^days:\s(.*)$/', $line, $matches);
if (count($matches) > 1)
   var_dump(explode('; ', $matches[1]));

array(3) { [0]=> string(6) “Monday” [1]=> string(8) “Thursday” [2]=> string(6) “Friday” }