Question

let’s say I have the following string:

danger13 afno 1 900004

using intval() it gives me 13, however, I want to grab the highest integer in the string, which is 9000004, how can I achieve this?

Edit: the string comes in different forms, and I don’t know where the highest number will be.

Answer 1

You’ll need to get all the integers out of the string, then find the biggest…

$str = "danger13 afno 1 900004";
preg_match_all('/\d+/', $str, $matches); // get all the number-only patterns
$numbers = $matches[0];

$numbers = array_map('intval', $numbers); // convert them to integers from string

$max = max($numbers); // get the largest

$max is now 900004.

Note that this is very simple. If your string has anything that matches the pattern \d+ (1 or more digits) that you don’t want to match as a separate integer (e.g. 43.535 would return 535), this won’t be satisfactory for you. You’ll need to define more closely what you mean.