Question

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Extract numbers from a string

I am using preg_match() to extract a number from a string.
Example string is: advent_id ----------- 3163 (1 row), I need to extract the number followed by the hyphens and not the number of rows. What is the correct way of writing a regex for it?
I tried preg_match('/^advent_id\s------------\s(.*)\s\(/', $cn, $matches); where $cn has that source string, but it did not work. Note that the number could have any number of digits.

Answer 1

Just extract the first integer in the row.

$x = 'advent_id ----------- 3163 (1 row)';
preg_match('/\d+/', $x, $m);
echo "$m[0]\n";

Produces:

3163

edit

as you can see, the default behaviour of preg_match() is to match the first occurrence, then stop. It’s different of preg_match_all()