On Sat, August 5, 2006 9:06 pm, Dave M G wrote: > While I'm only just learning about regular expressions in another > thread, I still seem to be finding exceptional situations which have > me > questioning the extent to which preg expressions can be implemented. > > (The following contains UTF-8 encoded Japanese text. Apologies if it > comes out as ASCII gibberish.) > > What I have are sentences that look like this: > æ°?温 ã??ã??ã??ã??ã?? (n) atmospheric temperature; (P); EP > ã?«ã?¤ã??ã?¦ (exp) concerning; along; under; per; KD Can you be sure that '(' will not appear in the Japanese part? preg_match('/^(.*)(\\(.*$)/', $text, $parts); echo "Japanese: $parts[1]<br />\n"; echo "Definition: $parts[2]<br />\n"; Then you could break apart the Japanese part based on whether there are or aren't the delimiters for the "reading" -- they looked kinda like parentheses before my ascii-centric email munged them. You might even be able to combine it all into one big preg_match if you worked at it. -- Like Music? http://l-i-e.com/artists.htm -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php