RegEx for PHP preg_replace swapping matches and matching multiple instances

Question

I'm looking for a RegEx for preg_replace in PHP for the following scenario:

example string "Bjerre- Jonas, Jorgensen- Silas, Wohlert- Johan, Madsen- Bo"
desired string "Jonas Bjerre, Silas Jorgensen, Johan Wohlert, Bo Madsen"
string is a csv field and double quotes are enclosures and are part of string
any number of occurrences may exist including none - the example clearly has 4
there is a consistent - to match on separating matches to be swapped

I'm a noob at PHP and RegEx and have been playing around in the cool test arena with things like preg_replace("/^\"(?<=- )/", ""$2 $1$3"", $input_lines); with horrible results. Thanks for help!

vks · Accepted Answer · 2015-06-14 18:16:02Z

1

([^," -]*)\s*-\s*([^," ]*)

Try this.See demo.

http://regex101.com/r/hI0qP0/20

$re = "/([^\", -]*)\\s*-\\s*([^,\" ]*)/m"; 
$str = "\"Bjerre- Jonas, Jorgensen- Silas, Wohlert- Johan, Madsen- Bo\""; 
$subst = "$2 $1"; 

$result = preg_replace($re, $subst, $str);

edited Jun 14, 2015 at 18:16

answered Jun 14, 2015 at 17:50

vks

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8 Comments

BartmanEH Over a year ago

Thanks, vks! It complains if I use 'g' modifier per demo but seems to work fine without any modifiers at all.

vks Over a year ago

@BartmanEH g is implicit with preg_replace(), you don't need to include it.

BartmanEH Over a year ago

I added a space after the dash to match only the unique case of '- ' as follows: /([^", - ]*)\s*-\s*([^," ]*)/ and now it works for the following string with hyphenated lastname: "Reisle- Martin, Malinowski- Jay, Brant-Briscall- Aiden, Vaughan- Elliot, Dolmont- Mark" returning "Martin Reisle, Jay Malinowski, Aiden Brant-Briscall, Elliot Vaughan, Mark Dolmont"

vks Over a year ago

@BartmanEH that is incorrect.` - ` inside [] forms an incorrect range.Use regex101.com/r/hI0qP0/24 instead.

BartmanEH Over a year ago

Thanks again vks. I was reviewing regex101.com's explanation of how it worked and couldn't understand how my error with an incorrect range worked at all but that's the way it goes with RegEx - you can get remarkably good accidental results in some test cases but the error will be exposed in subsequent test cases or in production

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