Re: Dividing, and keeping, text from the first space

On Wed, August 9, 2006 1:30 am, Dave M G wrote: > This regular expression stuff is way tricky. > > Thanks to help from this list, I have an expression that will select > the > first word of a string, up to the first white space: > "#^(.*)\s#iU" > > But after some consideration, I realized that I wanted to keep both > parts of the original text. The first word, and then everything that > came after it, should be divided and stored in separate variables. $pattern = "#^([^\\s]*)(\\s*)(.*\$)#sU"; preg_match($pattern, $input, $parts); echo "Before whitespace: $parts[1]<br />\n"; echo "Whitespace: $parts[2]<br />\n"; echo "After whitespace: $parts[3]<br />\n"; De-construction: #^ Anchored at the beginning of the string ([^\\s]*) Capture everything that's not whitespace (\\s*) Capture a contiguous run of whitespace (.*\$) Capture anything at all to the end of the string #sU 's' is mult-line, and U is ungreedy Aha! You may need to use (.*\$)? to get the greedy back "on" for the ending bit, so that \$ does not match the FIRST newline, but matches the END of the string. Please find and download "The Regex Coach" and play around with it. Its real-time syntax/pattern/match highlighting makes Regex a hell of a lot easier to figure out. -- Like Music? http://l-i-e.com/artists.htm