Order of expression in preg_split

[none]

Hello:

Using PHP 4.3.11

The line: $strDate = preg_split('/[\.\/-]/', $my_date);
works to break apart a date in the form mm/dd/yyyy or mm.dd.yyyy or
mm-dd-yyyy
but the line: $strDate = preg_split('/[\/-\.]/', $my_date);
doesn't work.

Why does the order of the items make a difference?

Thanks,

Ken

[d]

"none" <""krwl\"@(none)"> wrote in message
news:ML********************@rcn.net...

Hello:

Using PHP 4.3.11

The line: $strDate = preg_split('/[\.\/-]/', $my_date);
works to break apart a date in the form mm/dd/yyyy or mm.dd.yyyy or
mm-dd-yyyy
but the line: $strDate = preg_split('/[\/-\.]/', $my_date);
doesn't work.

Why does the order of the items make a difference?
In a regular expression character class definition (the bit in the []s), a
hyphen denotes a range of characters, so [a-z] will match all lowercase
letters of the alphabet, and [0-9] will match all numbers from 0 to 9. If
you escape your hyphen, it doesn't matter where you put it in your class.

$strDate = preg_split('/[\/\-\.]/', $my_date);
Thanks,

Ken

hope that helps!

dave

[Al13n]

"d" <[e-mail]> wrote:

In a regular expression character class definition (the bit in the []s), a
hyphen denotes a range of characters, so [a-z] will match all lowercase
letters of the alphabet, and [0-9] will match all numbers from 0 to 9. If
you escape your hyphen, it doesn't matter where you put it in your class.

$strDate = preg_split('/[\/\-\.]/', $my_date);

Absolutely right. Also, this is rather trivial, but you shouldn't need to
escape the . in a character class, it's only a token when used outside a
character class. When inside a character class, the dot as well as
quantifiers (like *, ? etc.) are interpreted as literals.

Allen

[none]

Al13n wrote:

In a regular expression character class definition (the bit in the []s), a
hyphen denotes a range of characters, so [a-z] will match all lowercase
letters of the alphabet, and [0-9] will match all numbers from 0 to 9. If
you escape your hyphen, it doesn't matter where you put it in your class.

$strDate = preg_split('/[\/\-\.]/', $my_date);

Absolutely right. Also, this is rather trivial, but you shouldn't need to
escape the . in a character class, it's only a token when used outside a
character class. When inside a character class, the dot as well as
quantifiers (like *, ? etc.) are interpreted as literals.

Allen and Dave:

Thanks very much for your help. I'm surprised that /[\.\/-]/ worked at
all! A better way to have written it would have been: #[./\-]# which
works great.

Thanks, again.

Ken