note 78593 rejected from function.sscanf by nlopess

Note Submitter: lord_dakron at hotmail dot com ---- Apparently sscanf is completely broken in PHP 4 and 5, and has been since I started using PHP in version 3. In every other language you call sscanf with a format string, but in PHP I have discovered that you can only limit variables with spaces. For example: <?php $MyString = "FirstName LastName-Email@Address.net"; list($Name, $Email) = sscanf($MyString, "%s-%s"); ?> This sets $Email to NULL and $Name to "FirstName". Now let's try it another way. <?php $MyString = "FirstName-LastName-Email@Address.net"; list($First, $Last, $Email) = sscanf($MyString, "%s-%s-%s"); ?> This sets $First to "FirstName-LastName-Email@Address.net" and the other two to NULL. The function only seems to pay attention to spaces and does NOT work properly. The best bet for a veteran programmer who has used sscanf in other languages such as C or C++ is to write a custom parasing function that scans strings one character at a time and parses it out itself.