Re: regular expression to extract from the middle of a string

Steve Turnbull wrote:

Hey folks I don't want to "just get you to do the work", but I have so far tried in vain to achieve something... I have a string similar to the following; cn=emailadmin,ou=services,dc=domain,dc=net I want to extract whatever falls between the 'cn=' and the following comma - in this case 'emailadmin'. Question(s); is this possible via a regular expression? does php have a better way of doing this? Some pointers would be greatly appreciated. Once I have working, I will be creating a function which will cater for this and will post to this list if anyone is interested? Cheers Steve

The fastest way to do this probably does not involve explodes or regular expressions. I would wager that the fastest method would be to do a strpos to find cn=, then a strpos to find the next comma (strpos supports offsets to start looking for), and then substr out the segment you've identified. However, if cn= is ALWAYS first, it's actually a lot simpler. Then it becomes something like this: $mystring = "cn=emailadmin,ou=services,dc=domain,dc=net"; $cnpart = substr($mystring, 2, strpos($mystring, ",") - 3 ); My offsets might be a bit off there, I always get confused with them and have to verify by running the code in case I mixed up a zero-based character position or something :P Regards, Adam.