Question

Just wondering if you can help me out a bit with a little task I’m trying to do in php.

I have text that looks something like this in a file:

    (random html)
    ...
    <OPTION VALUE="195" SELECTED>Physical Chem  
    <OPTION VALUE="239">Physical Chem Lab II  
    <OPTION VALUE="555">Physical Chem for Engineers            
    ...
    (random html)

I want to return the # value of the option values ignoring everything else.
For example, in the above case I would want 195, 239 & 555 returned, nothing else like “Option Value=”.

I am having trouble doing this in PHP. So far I have this:

preg_match("/OPTION VALUE=\"([0-9]*)/", $data, $matches);
        print_r($matches);  

With the return value of this:

Array ( [0] => OPTION VALUE=”195[1] => 195) Array ( [0] => OPTION VALUE=”195[1] => 195)

How can I return the all the #’s?

I’m a newbie at pattern matching and tutorials I’ve read haven’t helped much, so thanks a ton!

Answer 1

preg_match will return an array containing only the first match. The first index of the array wil return a match for the full regular expression, the second one matches the capture group in the parentheses, try the following to get a concept of how this works:

preg_match("/(OPTION) VALUE=\"([0-9]*)/", $data, $matches);
    print_r($matches);

You will see that it outputs the following:

Array
(
    [0] => OPTION VALUE="195
    [1] => OPTION
    [2] => 195
)

Array[0] contains data of the full match, array [1] contains data from the first capture group (OPTION) and array[2] contains data from the second capture group ([0-9]*).

In order to match more than one occurrence, you need to use the preg_match_all function. If we apply this to your original code like so:

preg_match_all("/OPTION VALUE=\"([0-9]*)/", $data, $matches);
    print_r($matches);

We get:

Array
(
    [0] => Array
        (
            [0] => OPTION VALUE="195
            [1] => OPTION VALUE="239
            [2] => OPTION VALUE="555
        )

    [1] => Array
        (
            [0] => 195
            [1] => 239
            [2] => 555
        )

)

I hope this makes things clear!