PHP Regular expression get numbers before text

Question

could someone help me with my regular expression in php?

this is my regex:

(?:\d*(\,)\d*)(\,\d*)?(\,\d*)?(\,\d*)?

this is my testdata:

1~ 2,906,730 RX

1-.’ 2,733,975 Rx

/ 132,882 RX mu uuu Au

'2(*__/ 182 rX ....212

I need to match the numbers before 'RX' or 'rX' or 'Rx'. with above code the numbers in the last line don't get matched because it misses a ','.

I believe there is a better way to do this. right now my regular expression doesn't even check if its followed by 'RX'.

any help would greatly be appreciated! solution may be posted in php code.

Matching any combination of numbers and dots (simplest approach) could be done with [\d.]+ and a space can be noted literally or with \s and a literal RX at the end would work with the /i case-insensitive flag. — mario
– mario, Commented Apr 10, 2014 at 1:43

Barmar · Accepted Answer · 2014-04-10 22:47:57Z

3

I think this will do it:

preg_match('/\d{1,3}(?:,\d{3}+)*(?= rx)/i', $data, $match);

?= is a positive lookahead -- it requires the previous regexp to be followed by this group. And i makes the regexp case-insensitive, so it will match RX, rx, or any combination.

DEMO

edited Apr 10, 2014 at 22:47

answered Apr 10, 2014 at 1:45

Barmar

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6 Comments

Sharanya Dutta Over a year ago

If the comma is to be used as the thousands separator, a better regular expression will be "/\\d{1,3}(?:,\\d{3})*(?= rx)/i" but I admit that the author of the question has left it unclear.

Barmar Over a year ago

@SharanyaDutta Thx. You don't need to double the backslashes inside single-quoted strings.

Sharanya Dutta Over a year ago

I’ve written the regular expression as a double-quoted string. You may consider using preg_match_all instead of preg_match so the author of the question gets all the matching values, not only the first one.

Barmar Over a year ago

I don't know whether the OP is processing the input data all at once or line by line. It seems like his main problem was getting the regexp right, not the PHP syntax for using it.

Barmar Over a year ago

You can remove the commas after matching with str_replace().

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