Question

I’ve a littile question about preg_matches, these regex things are really hard to understand and I hope someone can give the right awnser!

I have the following text:

0A-24-423

But this can also be:

0A-242-2

or

0A-2-423

How can I use preg_matches to filter these? I was using

substr($something, 0,2)

so that it captures 0A and

substr($seat, 4,5)

This will capture 24 but when you get 242 it wont capture the last 2….

Hope someone can help creating this in preg_match!

to make it more clear what I have now:

        foreach($_POST['seats'] AS $seat) {
        if ($count > 0) {
            $selectQuery .= " || ";
        }
        $selectQuery .= " ( rowId = '" . substr($seat, 0,2) . "'";
        $selectQuery .= " and `order` = " . substr($seat, 3,5) . "  ";
        $selectQuery .= " and columnId = " . substr($seat, 6) . " ) ";
        $count++;

and $seat had the following format XXXXXX and using substr I can get the right things (for example: 0J3017)

Something Like this should do it:

    $selectQuery = "SELECT * from seats where ";
    $count = 0;
$pattern = "I DON'T KNOW :( ";
    foreach($_POST['seats'] AS $seat) {
        if ($count > 0) {
            $selectQuery .= " || ";
        }
        preg_match($pattern, $seats, $matches);
        $selectQuery .= " ( rowId = '" . $matches[0] . "'";
        $selectQuery .= " and `order` = " . $matches[1] . "  ";
        $selectQuery .= " and columnId = " . $matches[2] . " ) ";
        $count++;

and $seats is explained in the beginning of the post (it has a format of XX-XXX-XXX

where the first 2 XX  are 0[A-Z] (yes the 0 is correct)
where the 3 first XXX are [0-9]
Where the last 3  XXX are [0-9]

EDIT:
there are 2 ways to solve this.

Option 1:

$pattern = "/(.*)-(.*)-(.*)/";

or use explode() function.

Answer 1

It does not look like you need to be using regular expressions. Here’s an example using explode() and list():

list($row_id, $order, $column_id) = explode('-', $seat, 3);

You could then use those three new variables in your $selectQuery.