Question

I’ve tried searching for a solution online but have had no luck (i´m a PHP beginner). I have two strings (collection of phone numbers with a time-stamps) that have comma separated values. I need to check if a specific part of text between the commas from sting A can be found in string B.

Here is an example of sting A:

9858264-2012-12-05T00:11:28.806Z,1265482-2012-12-05T22:19:49.769Z,9598643-2012-12-05T22:46:17.115Z,

Here is an example og sting B:

5555649-2012-12-05T22:37:23.765Z,3594595-2012-12-05T22:44:36.363Z,8549851-2012-12-05T22:46:01.259Z,9598643-2012-12-05T22:46:09.600Z

In the above strings, the below two values are very similar (only few seconds in the time-stamp are different):

From string A: 9598643-2012-12-05T22:46:17.115Z
From string B: 9598643-2012-12-05T22:46:09.600Z

What I need to do is COUNT the number of values between commas in string A that match in string B apart from the last 5 characters in the time-stamp as those could be the same occurrences but with +/- a few seconds apart.

I have thought of using php explode to get every value into an array and then comparing them, but I´m rather lost at this point when it comes to array and also on how to compare one array value to the other minus the last 5 characters of an value.

Answer 1

You could do something like this.

function make_string_into_nice_array ($string) {
    $string_array = explode(',',$string);
    return array_map(function($str) {
        return substr($str, 0, -5);    
    }, $string_array);
}

$array_a = make_string_into_nice_array($string_a);
$array_b = make_string_into_nice_array($string_b);

$matched_array = array_intersect($array_a, $array_b);

echo count($matched_array);