Re: regex

At 02:54 PM 1/12/01 , Jerry Lake wrote:

is it possible with regex to change one or more text characters followed by a space into the same characters followed by a tab? Jerry Lake

For example -

        $NewString = ereg_replace("([[:alpha:]]+) ", "\\1".chr(9), $String);

This will convert a sequence of one or more alphabetic characters followed by one space to the same set of characters followed by a tab (that's the chr(9) part). If you want to match only a specific set of text characters - say, a, e, i, o and u - then you can use

        $NewString = eregi_replace("([aeiou]+) ", "\\1".chr(9), $String);

Notice i used eregi_replace() instead of ereg_replace(); the 'i' means case INsensitive. Of course, there are other ways of doing this with preg_replace and str_replace, both of which are faster than ereg_replace (str_replace is the fastest); I happen to use ereg becaouse I'm most familiar with it, since it came along before the preg_ functions. As always, you can check out the docs:

        http://www.php.net/ereg_replace
        http://www.php.net/eregi_replace
        http://www.php.net/str_replace
        http://www.php.net/preg_replace

        -steve

(The usual off-the-top-of-my-head-untested-code-snippet caveats apply) +------------------------------------------------------------------------+

| Steve Edberg                           University of California, Davis |
| sbedberg@ucdavis.edu                                     (530)754-9127 |
| http://aesric.ucdavis.edu/                  http://pgfsun.ucdavis.edu/ |

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