Regex的替代方法，用于从字符串中提取信息

Question

I'm attempt to extract information from a string, which will always be in the same format.

The format will always be:

To:
                     Name here
Date:
                     26/08/2014 14:52
Order Number:
                     123456
Service Required:
                     Plumbing
Service Response:
                     48 Hour
Service Limit:
                     110.00

123 TEST ROAD
LEEDS
LS1 1HL

Contact:
                     Mr J Smith - 0777 123456
Telephone:
                     01921 123456

Work Details:

Notes here etc 

I have tried exploding the string by spaces and looping through the array but I cannot structure it in such a way that I receive the information.

E.g: I try to retrieve "Name here" from after "To:" without also retrieving "Date: etc..", the eventual idea is to create variables for each bit of information so i can enter it into a database.

Any help/suggestions/idea's are really welcome.

thanks for reading

Answer 1

You could use regex easily.

If you use this regex, you can get the name here:

To:\s+(.*)

Working demo

The idea of this regex is to look for the key you want to look for and fetch the value. For instance, above regex looks for To: whitespaces and store in a capturing group the content.

You just need to change To for whatever you want, if you modify it to Date you will get the date.

As a note, this only works with single line values.

The code to implement this regex in php is very straightforward, like this:

$re = "/To:\\s+(.*)/";
$str = "YOUR STRING HERE";
preg_match($re, $str, $matches);

On the other hand, below data follows a different pattern:

123 TEST ROAD
LEEDS
LS1 1HL

You'd need a different regex pattern too, so to fetch that information you could use:

^(\w+[\w\s]+)(?!:)$

Working demo