A PHP substring issue

Question

I got a simple php issue which is that I don't know how to use substring here...

ABCDEF[RAND NUMBER 1-10000000]GH

And so I need to get that random number using substring,

I dont know if my brain works correctly today but I really couldnt figure how to do that.

my expected output is as i said that random number. also i didnt tried any code because i have no idea how to do that — Nadia Krawczyk
– Nadia Krawczyk, Commented Apr 15, 2014 at 11:04
Are the letters exactly as you wrote above, than you can go with strpos to determine the start and the end of the number by searching for "F" and "G". Otherwise I would go for an regular expression. — AthanasiusKirchner
– AthanasiusKirchner, Commented Apr 15, 2014 at 11:07

Pankaj Garg · Accepted Answer · 2014-04-15 11:15:28Z

3

Regex is always better in this case but If your string pattern is fixed like ABCDEF123456GH, you can simply use substr like

$str = "ABCDEF432465GH";
echo substr($str, 6, -2);

answered Apr 15, 2014 at 11:15

Pankaj Garg

1,3321 gold badge17 silver badges23 bronze badges

Sign up to request clarification or add additional context in comments.

3 Comments

Sergey Telshevsky Over a year ago

Why was this downvoted? This does exactly what the OP wants - extracts the random number from the string with offsets. As you may see the example in the question is rather stupid one not describing the context so it well may be there are other digits around the string, so this solution may be the only one correct as regexes mentioned above won't work.

Sergey Telshevsky Over a year ago

Not to mention that performance wise string functions are times faster than regular expressions.

Sergey Telshevsky Over a year ago

@CodeBird I am calm, mate, this is just one of those situations where a simple solution is considered bad/wrong by someone because it's simple, so I try to point people to be more mindful about it :)

CodeBird · Accepted Answer · 2014-04-15 11:12:25Z

3

This will do, no need for substr or anything:

$string='ABCDEF432465GH';
echo preg_replace('/[a-z\[\] ]*/i', '', $string);

https://eval.in/136918

edited Apr 15, 2014 at 11:12

answered Apr 15, 2014 at 11:06

CodeBird

3,8132 gold badges22 silver badges38 bronze badges

1 Comment

CodeBird Over a year ago

@ICanHasCheezburger done, I didn't think that the [] are actually in there

mpapec · Accepted Answer · 2014-04-15 11:17:29Z

3

Regular expressions are better when you don't know where in the text is desired substring,

$string = "ABCDEF10000000GH";

if (preg_match("/(\d+)/", $string, $m)) {
  print $m[1];
}

edited Apr 15, 2014 at 11:17

answered Apr 15, 2014 at 11:06

mpapec

50.7k8 gold badges71 silver badges133 bronze badges

Collectives™ on Stack Overflow

A PHP substring issue

3 Answers 3

3 Comments

1 Comment

Comments

Your Answer

Linked

Hot Network Questions

Collectives™ on Stack Overflow

3 Answers 3

3 Comments

1 Comment

Comments

Your Answer

Sign up or log in

Post as a guest

Linked

Related