problem using array and substr

[Patrick Londema]

Hi,

I'm trying to write a function that takes a string and splits this into 3
distinct sections for a project I'm working on.

This string in question has the following formet:
"% 999990008312?;0008312999990000?"
The important bits i want to extract are the 1st and second numbers. In this
example that is 99999 and 0008312. The sequence of 9's has a fixed length
of 5 chars and the other number is whatever follows those 5 until the
questionmark.

My idea was to use explode to get the string up to the "?" and the use
substr() to split the remaining string into the bits I want. Not being the
greatest coder in the world I came up with this ($card_string is from the
function call):
$card_string = trim($card_string, "%"); // get rid of the first char and
all those annoying spaces
$card_data = explode("?", $card_string);
$card_ver = substr($card_data[0],0,5); // first 5 chars of string
$card_id = substr("$card_data[0]",6); // all other chars

I expected $card_ver to become "99999" and $card_id to contain "0008312",
BUT what I actually get is $card_ver empty and $card_id "999990008312". If
I insert a line $card_data[0] = "999990008312" this actually does happen,
but if I knew the string's content, why would I write a function?
Typecasting $card_data[0] to type string with either
'$card_ver_string_typed = (string) substr($card_data[0],0,5);' or
$card_data_string = "$card_data[0]" don't help either.

Am I overlooking something, is this a very weird limitation of PHP or is
there just an easier way of doing this alltogether?

All help more than welcome!

Patrick Londema
Debian GNU/Linus Testing
PHP 4.1.2
Apache 1.3.26

Hope this doesn't show up twice anywhere, newsreader gave me a really big
error message when I tried to post...

[Janwillem Borleffs]

Patrick Londema wrote:

My idea was to use explode to get the string up to the "?" and the use
substr() to split the remaining string into the bits I want. Not
being the greatest coder in the world I came up with this
($card_string is from the function call):
This is where the power of regular expressions kicks in:

$s = "% 999990008312?;0008312999990000?";

if (preg_match("/(\d{5})(\d+)/", $s, $match)) {
array_shift($match);
print_r($match);
}
PHP 4.1.2

Time to upgrade to the 4.3 branch at least...
JW