Wow, that definitely works. I would sort of like to know how to tweak the
regex, but maybe this is the best way of doing it. Is "[0-9]*[.0-9]*?" the
best way of looking for a number with decimals?
On 9/26/05, Murray @ PlanetThoughtful <lists@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> > I need to catch all instances of a coordinate in a give string. So far I
> > have this, which only works if the coordinate is in a certain format.
> >
> >
> > $string = (334,-53.44),(111,222);
> > $expression = '([(][-]?[0-9]*[.0-9]*?,[-]?[0-9]*[.0-9]*?[)])';
> > preg_match_all($expression, "$string", $matches);
> >
> > This returns the correct strings (334,-53.44) and (111,222), but I'd
> like
> > all formats to work. Like (111, 222), ( 111 , 222 ), (111, 222 ), etc,
> > etc.
> > How would I change my regex to accomplish this?
>
> Hi David,
>
> Someone else may have a more direct answer (ie a tweak of your regex that
> accounts for the possibilities that you've mentioned) but looking at your
> email I immediately had a concern over "etc, etc".
>
> Regular expressions rely very much on you being able to predict the
> different possible cases you will be dealing with.
>
> Looking at the examples you provided, it looks like you're (currently?)
> concerned with anomalous spaces in your string.
>
> A simple way of dealing with these would be to do:
>
> $string = str_replace(" ", "", $string);
>
> ...before you attempt your regex match. This will remove all spaces from
> the
> string, making it fit a more predictable pattern (one that your current
> regex matches).
>
> If, however, there are other possible anomalous characters you need to
> take
> into account, it would be much more helpful if you could supply examples
> of
> them.
>
> Much warmth,
>
> Murray
> ---
> "Lost in thought..."
> http://www.planetthoughtful.org
>
>
>
--
David Pollack
DHPollack@xxxxxxxxx
www.atlspecials.com <http://www.atlspecials.com>
www.da3.net <http://www.da3.net>
