Question

Possible Duplicate:
a simple function for return number from string in php

What’s the best/most efficient method to extract a specific set of numbers from a string? For example: I want to get the set of numbers immediately after Case# in sring “blah blah Case#004522 blah blah”. I imagine the number of numeric characters after Case# will always be the same but I would like the code to not make that assumption as I have been.

So far I have been using a strpos method to locate Case# and then pull a specific number of characters afterwords using substr. I just feel like this is clunky. Maybe preg_match would be more effective or simplified?

$text = "blah blah Case#004552 blah blah";
$find = strpos($text,'Case#');
if ( $find )
  $numbers = substr($text, $find+5, 6);

Answer 1

You can make use of regular expressions to first match your pattern of characters (Case#) and then you expect to match numbers only (digits), that is \d in PCRE (Demo):

$numbers = preg_match("/Case#(\d+)/", $text, $matches)
              ? (int)$matches[1]
              : NULL
    ;
unset($matches);

For multiple (integer) matches at once:

$numbers = preg_match_all("/Case#(\d+)/", $text, $matches)
              ? array_map('intval', $matches[1])
              : NULL
    ;
unset($matches);