Question

In a text file, I have the folowing strings :

 ID  |      LABEL       | A |   B  | C
--------------------------------------
9999 | Oxygen Isotopes  |   | 0.15 | 1 
8733 | Enriched Uranium |   | 1    | 1 

I would like to extract the fields ID and LABEL of each line using regular expression.

How I can achieve it ?

Answer 1

I doubt regex is the best solution here.

Try this to separate the text file into an array of lines (this might or might not work, depending on the OS of the machine you created the txt file on)

$lines = explode($text, "\n");
$final_lines = array();

foreach ($lines as $line) {
    $parts = explode($line, " | ");
    $final_lines[] = $parts;
}

Now you can access all of the data through the line number then the column, like

$final_lines[2][0]

Will contain 8733.