note 24657 deleted from function.ereg by kennyt

Note Submitter: verdy_p at wanadoo dot fr ---- A more precise and valid parsing of British postcodes into its pieces, is: * (1) City/Town Code (1 letter min.): Most codes have 2 letters, some have 1 letter, possible future codes may have more letters. * Optional (non standard) separator(s), such as space(s), used sometimes. May be stripped. * (2) City/Town Division (required): - 1 non-null digit exactly [*], - followed by optional letters (currently 1 max). Examples: "A1", "A1X", "WF1", "WF1M" Invalid: "A12", "WF12" * Optional separator (space or dash): The separator is optional because of rule [*] above which limits the city code starting with a letter to having at most 1 embedded or final digit. The standard separator is a space, but many hand-written postcodes would not have this space very visible, so this space must be optional and its position can be infered. * (3) Postcode suffix (3 characters min.): - 1 or more digits (currently 1 max.) - optional letters (currently 2 max.) Note that lowercase letters may be acceptable but should be avoided. I assume that the letters I, S, and Z are avoided (to avoid confusion with the handwritten 1, 5 and 2 digits), like the digit 0 (which could be confused with the letter O). But there may be exceptions (notably for the first letter of the code): "SI2" could be valid, and not "S12" for the City/Town +Division Code... A regexp that matches these rules is: $valid = eregi( '^[ \t]*([A-Z][A-HJ-RT-Y]?)[ \t]*-?[ \t]*([1-9][A-HJ-RT-Y]{1,2})[ \t]*-?[ \t]*([1-9][A-Z]{1,2})[ \t]*$', $postcode, $parse); if ($valid) { $citycode = strtoupper($parse[0]); $divisioncode = strtoupper($parse[1]); $suffixcode = strtoupper($parse[2]); }