note 104408 added to function.preg-match

My boss is trying to learn PHP, so sometimes I give him a mini-lesson. Here is what I shared with him today about using preg_match. I used to like doing my text manipulations in SQL but now I know how PHP is much faster and more powerful. Any data manipulation needed, I save it for PHP functions. Here is an example of just that. <?php ////I need to display the City State and Primary phone number in another format. ////Here is an example of the data how it is stored in the database. $data = "CYPRESS CA90638 7145552205625551898"; $pattern = '/(\D+?)\s+(\D{2,2})(\d+)\s+(\d{10,10}?)/'; ///////////////with regular expressions you basically tell it what types of characters to look for ///////////////and how many of that type are in a sequence. /////////////// \D is a non-digit, \d is a digit, \s is a space, and when I put ( ) parenthesis around a ///////////////sequence I am matching that means I want that part of the string saved in an array. preg_match($pattern,$data,$matches); /////////////////$matches will be an array of my matched data. ///////////////So now, $matches[1] is the city, $matches[2] is the state, /////////////// $matches[3] is the zip, and $matches[4] is the Primary phone number. //Now I can make the address and phone number pretty,like ////CYPRESS, CA 90638 ////(714) 555-5220 //And here is the last of the code. Here is where I //use the result array to format my address and phone data. $addr2 = $matches[1].', '.$matches[2].' '.$matches[3]; $phone = '('.substr($matches[4],0,3).') '.substr($matches[4],3,3).'-'.substr($matches[4],6); ?> ---- Server IP: 69.147.83.197 Probable Submitter: 174.127.8.233 ---- Manual Page -- http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.preg-match.php Edit -- https://master.php.net/note/edit/104408 Del: integrated -- https://master.php.net/note/delete/104408/integrated Del: useless -- https://master.php.net/note/delete/104408/useless Del: bad code -- https://master.php.net/note/delete/104408/bad+code Del: spam -- https://master.php.net/note/delete/104408/spam Del: non-english -- https://master.php.net/note/delete/104408/non-english Del: in docs -- https://master.php.net/note/delete/104408/in+docs Del: other reasons-- https://master.php.net/note/delete/104408 Reject -- https://master.php.net/note/reject/104408 Search -- https://master.php.net/manage/user-notes.php