PHP RegEx - how do I extract matches from a string?

Question

Say I have the following string:

BlahBlah........1.000
Whatevah....2.000
Something......6.500

...that is, some text, followed by four or more dots, followed by a number (that may have a dot as a delimiter) followed by a newline (Linux or Windows, I don't know if that's important). It's a part of a larger string.

How do I extract the text and numbers into variables? More precisely an array of value pairs (array of arrays). I just can't get my head around regular expressions yet... :(

Answer 1

use this regex:

(?<word>\w+)\.+(?<number>\d+(\.\d+)?)

with preg_match_all():

preg_match_all("/(?<word>\w+)\.+(?<number>\d+(\.\d+)?)/", $yourString, $theArrayYouWantToStoreMatchesInIt);

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To capture anything after 4 dots you can use this:

(?<word>\w+)\.{4,}(?<anything>.*)

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The following will also capture strings that have spaces in their first part:

(?<beforeDots>[^\.]+)\.{4,}(?<afterDots>.*)

It's also a good idea to limit the matching text to certain range of characters to make the regex more accurate:

(?<beforeDots>[a-zA-Z0-9 ]+)\.{4,}(?<afterDots>[a-zA-Z0-9\. ]+)