Question

With PHP if you have a string which may or may not have spaces after the dot, such as:

"1. one 2.too 3. free 4. for 5.five "

What function can you use to create an array as follows:

array(1 => "one", 2 => "too", 3 => "free", 4 => "for", 5 => "five") 

with the key being the list item number (e.g the array above has no 0)

I presume a regular expression is needed and perhaps use of preg_split or similar? I’m terrible at regular expressions so any help would be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

I got a quick hack and it seems to be working fine for me

        $string = "1. one 2.too 3. free 4. for 5.five ";

    $text_only = preg_replace("/[^A-Z,a-z]/",".",$string);
    $num_only = preg_replace("/[^0-9]/",".",$string);

    $explode_nums = explode('.',$num_only);
    $explode_text = explode('.',$text_only);

    foreach($explode_text as $key => $value)
    {
        if($value !== '' && $value !== ' ')
        {
            $text_array[] = $value;
        }
    }

    foreach($explode_nums as $key => $value)
    {
        if($value !== '' && $value !== ' ')
        {
            $num_array[] = $value;
        }
    }

    foreach($num_array as $key => $value)
    {
        $new_array[$value] = $text_array[$key];
    }

    print_r($new_array);

Test it out and let me know if works fine