Question

My string looks like so

February 2009

bla bla

March 2009

doo daa bla lbla

Septemer 2009

So I wrote this regex to split it up into months (which is what I want to do first, I think)

$regex = '/(.*)\s(\d){4}/i';

This matches them perfectly, except it throws away the actual string they were split on .. i.e. I want that information (as in February 2009, March 2009 etc)

I’ve tried mucking around with the preg_split() flags, but could not get what I wanted.

Should I be using a different approach? Is there an easy to split text via a regex but keep the text that was actually there?

Come to think of it, I could probably use `preg_match_all()’ here… I hope I just didn’t answer my own question in the answer – I’m going to post anyway to see what the community thinks.

Thanks

Answer 1

Put the splitting string into its own capture group. So given your example,

$regex = '/(.*)\s(\d){4}/';

with a few modifications becomes:

$regex = '/(.+?)(\s)(\d{4})/';

If your matches array is called "$matches", $matches[0] will contain the whole match, $matches[1] the month, $matches[2] the splitting string, and $matches[3] the year.