php regex - splitting strings - one output form

Question

I'm wondering a good way of splitting strings by a | delimiter if the input strings could be of the following form:

"foo,    bar"
"foo       ,bar"
"foo,bar"
"foo , bar"
"foo bar"
"foo,,bar"

So the only possible outputs strings are as:

"foo|bar"
"foo|bar|other|here"

Independently of how many terms are within the input string.

Any thoughts would be appreciated!

NikiC · Accepted Answer · 2010-09-24 15:16:48Z

2

preg_replace('/\s*,\s*/', '|', $string);

This will handle the cases with the comma ;) If you need the one with only the whitespace too:

preg_replace('\s*,\s*|\s+', '|', $string);

answered Sep 24, 2010 at 15:16

NikiC

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Comments

codaddict · Accepted Answer · 2010-09-24 15:25:38Z

1

I would do:

    $input = preg_replace('/[ ,]+/', '|', $input);

edited Sep 24, 2010 at 15:25

answered Sep 24, 2010 at 15:19

codaddict

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1 Comment

NikiC Over a year ago

this will allow foo,,,,,bar, too.

Spudley · Accepted Answer · 2010-09-24 18:40:46Z

0

Something like this should do the trick...

$outputstring = preg_replace_all('/\b[ ,|]+\b/','|',$inputstring);

to explain:

\b is a word-boundary, so it is looking for any combination of spaces, commas or pipes between two word boundaries.

edited Sep 24, 2010 at 18:40

answered Sep 24, 2010 at 15:18

Spudley

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4 Comments

NikiC Over a year ago

This will match foo,,,bar, , , , , foo, too.

Spudley Over a year ago

@nick -- true. but the questioner didn't specify what to do with multiple commas; in fact, I read his last example a implying to ignore them.

NikiC Over a year ago

This last example wasn't there when I wrote my answer and this comment. After the change your response is obviously correct. (Why doesn't stackoverflow show all edits any more?)

NikiC Over a year ago

Ah, got it. There is a 5 minute grace period in which edits aren't logged ;)

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