who is good at regular expressions?

[brendan]

my regular expression knowledge is admittedly amateurish ... I have spent an
hour trying to get this to work without any great success, but am in the
middle of a big project so I can't waste a day fiddling around to get it to
work (although I might have to if someone here can't help).

I thought I would throw it out to the group to see if anyone could solve the
problem quick and easy.

I need to break a search string into components to search against a
database.
We want to allow the user to specify database columns by using

[column name][colon][search text]

i.e.
"author:Jane Smith institution:university of Cambridge year:1976"

so basically we have to split the string at the beginning of any word that
ends in a colon.
I need then get an array with column_name=>column_value to construct a SQL
query from.

At the moment I'm just getting garbage or parse errors ... Can anyone help?
Accolades for anyone that can. A pint of lager for anyone in Cambridge that
can!
cheers
Brendan.

[Erwin Moller]

brendan wrote:

my regular expression knowledge is admittedly amateurish ... I have spent
an hour trying to get this to work without any great success, but am in
the middle of a big project so I can't waste a day fiddling around to get
it to work (although I might have to if someone here can't help).

I thought I would throw it out to the group to see if anyone could solve
the problem quick and easy.

I need to break a search string into components to search against a
database.
We want to allow the user to specify database columns by using

[column name][colon][search text]

i.e.
"author:Jane Smith institution:university of Cambridge year:1976"

so basically we have to split the string at the beginning of any word that
ends in a colon.
I need then get an array with column_name=>column_value to construct a SQL
query from.

At the moment I'm just getting garbage or parse errors ... Can anyone
help? Accolades for anyone that can. A pint of lager for anyone in
Cambridge that can!
cheers
Brendan.

Hi,

Who needs regexp? :P

Try something like this:

<?
// [column name][colon][search text]

$test = "author:Jane Smith institution:university of Cambridge year:1976";
$result = array();

$parts = explode(":",$test);
for($i=0;$i<count($parts);$i+=2){
$result[$parts[$i]] = $parts[$i+1];
}

echo "<pre>".var_dump($result)."</pre>";
?>
Regards,
Erwin Moller

PS: Does your reward also include the ticket to Cambridge from Holland? ;-)

[Marcin Dobrucki]

brendan wrote:

We want to allow the user to specify database columns by using

[column name][colon][search text]

i.e.
"author:Jane Smith institution:university of Cambridge year:1976"

so basically we have to split the string at the beginning of any word that
ends in a colon.

Like this?

...
list ($col, $string, $year) = split (":", $input);
...

/Marcin

[brendan]

"Erwin Moller"
<si******************************************@spam yourself.com> wrote in
message news:43***********************@news.xs4all.nl...

We want to allow the user to specify database columns by using

[column name][colon][search text]

i.e.
"author:Jane Smith institution:university of Cambridge year:1976"

Who needs regexp? :P

Try something like this:

<?
// [column name][colon][search text]

$test = "author:Jane Smith institution:university of Cambridge year:1976";
$result = array();

$parts = explode(":",$test);
for($i=0;$i<count($parts);$i+=2){
$result[$parts[$i]] = $parts[$i+1];

Regards,
Erwin Moller

PS: Does your reward also include the ticket to Cambridge from Holland?

;-)

Hi Erwin,
Exploding on the colon will result in the column name ending up in the
previous array set
ie
arrayname["author"]= "Jane Smith institution";
arrayname["university of Cambridge year"1976";
....
which is unfortunately not what I am looking for ... I need it to split at
the begining of any word ending in a colon, not at the colon point.
Unfortunately the offer doesn't include the ticket. However, I'm sure I
could organise delivery next time I am up your way ;)
b.

[Juha Suni]

brendan wrote:

I need to break a search string into components to search against a
database.
We want to allow the user to specify database columns by using

[column name][colon][search text]

i.e.
"author:Jane Smith institution:university of Cambridge year:1976"

Not regexp, more quick'n'dirty but perfectly works and accepts strings in
the format above with as many parameters as required.

All the data is available in a single array ($querydata), see the bottom of
the script:
$string = "author:Jane Smith institution:university of Cambridge year:1976";

$qrykeys = array();
$qryvalues = array();
$tmpwords = array();

$parts = explode(" ",$string);

foreach($parts as $key => $value) {
if (strpos($value,":") !== false) {
if (count($tmpwords) >= 1) {
array_push($qryvalues,implode(" ",$tmpwords));
$tmpwords = array();
}
$subparts = explode(":",$value);
array_push($qrykeys,$subparts[0]);
array_push($tmpwords,$subparts[1]);
}
else {
array_push($tmpwords,$value);
}
}

array_push($qryvalues,implode(" ",$tmpwords));
$tmpwords = array();

$querydata = array();
for ($i = 0; $i!=count($qrykeys) ; $i++) {
$querydata[$qrykeys[$i]] = $qryvalues[$i];
}

print_r($querydata);


HTH
--
Suni

[Sandman]

In article <df**********@gemini.csx.cam.ac.uk>,
"brendan" <br*************@srl.cam.ac.uk> wrote:

my regular expression knowledge is admittedly amateurish ... I have spent an
hour trying to get this to work without any great success, but am in the
middle of a big project so I can't waste a day fiddling around to get it to
work (although I might have to if someone here can't help).

I thought I would throw it out to the group to see if anyone could solve the
problem quick and easy.

I need to break a search string into components to search against a
database.
We want to allow the user to specify database columns by using

[column name][colon][search text]

i.e.
"author:Jane Smith institution:university of Cambridge year:1976"

so basically we have to split the string at the beginning of any word that
ends in a colon.
I need then get an array with column_name=>column_value to construct a SQL
query from.

At the moment I'm just getting garbage or parse errors ... Can anyone help?
Accolades for anyone that can. A pint of lager for anyone in Cambridge that
can!
cheers
Brendan.

This is one way to do it:

#!/usr/bin/php
<?
$string = "author:Jane Smith institution:university of Cambridge year:1976";
$m = preg_split("/\s*(\w+):/", $string, -1,
PREG_SPLIT_NO_EMPTY|PREG_SPLIT_DELIM_CAPTURE);
for ($i=0;$i<=count($m)-1;$i+=2){
$sql_query[] = $m[$i] . " = '" . $m[$i+1] . "'";
}
print "select * from database.table where " . join(" and ", $sql_query);
?>

The output:

select * from database.table where author = 'Jane Smith' and institution =
'university of Cambridge' and year = '1976'

--
Sandman[.net]

[brendan]

"Sandman" <[e-mail]> wrote in message
news:mr**********************@individual.net...> #!/usr/bin/php

<?
$string = "author:Jane Smith institution:university of Cambridge year:1976"; $m = preg_split("/\s*(\w+):/", $string, -1,
PREG_SPLIT_NO_EMPTY|PREG_SPLIT_DELIM_CAPTURE);
for ($i=0;$i<=count($m)-1;$i+=2){
$sql_query[] = $m[$i] . " = '" . $m[$i+1] . "'";
}
print "select * from database.table where " . join(" and ", $sql_query); ?>

The output:

select * from database.table where author = 'Jane Smith' and institution =
'university of Cambridge' and year = '1976' Sandman[.net]

Thank you sandman! That works perfectly. Beer waiting at the Eagle for you!
regards,
brendan.

[Chung Leong]

That is actually a very tricky regexp to write, because the presence of
the colon at the end of a word changes its meaning, from being part of
the previous values to that of a keyword. With the example given, it'd
be hard to keep the regexp engine from appending "institution" to "Jane
Smith."

The trick here is to reverse the string, then reverse the values after
they've been extracted. Since keywords don't contain white-spaces, it's
easy to tell the regexp where it should stop.

$s = "author:Jane Smith institution:university of Cambridge year:1976";
$r = strrev($s);
preg_match_all("/\s*(.*?)\s*:\s*(\S+)/", $r, $m, PREG_SET_ORDER);
foreach($m as $set) {
$key = strrev($set[2]);
$value = strrev($set[1]);
$values[$key] = $value;
}
print_r($values);

[Sandman]

In article <df**********@gemini.csx.cam.ac.uk>,
"brendan" <br*************@srl.cam.ac.uk> wrote:

"Sandman" <[e-mail]> wrote in message
news:mr**********************@individual.net...> #!/usr/bin/php

<?
$string = "author:Jane Smith institution:university of Cambridge

year:1976";

$m = preg_split("/\s*(\w+):/", $string, -1,
PREG_SPLIT_NO_EMPTY|PREG_SPLIT_DELIM_CAPTURE);
for ($i=0;$i<=count($m)-1;$i+=2){
$sql_query[] = $m[$i] . " = '" . $m[$i+1] . "'";
}
print "select * from database.table where " . join(" and ",

$sql_query);

?>

The output:

select * from database.table where author = 'Jane Smith' and institution =
'university of Cambridge' and year = '1976'

Sandman[.net]

Thank you sandman! That works perfectly. Beer waiting at the Eagle for you!
regards,

An even more effective way:

#!/usr/bin/php
<?
$string = "author:Jane Smith institution:university of Cambridge year:1976";
$match = preg_split("/ (?=\w+:)/", $string, -1, PREG_SPLIT_DELIM_CAPTURE)
foreach ($match as $m){
list ($field, $value) = split(":", $m);
$sql_query[] = "$field = '$value'";
}
print "select * from database.table where " . join(" and ", $sql_query);
?>
And I don't drink alcohol :)
--
Sandman[.net]