Replying to myself now.
On Tue, Nov 4, 2008 at 7:40 AM, Yeti <yeti@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>> ltrim($line, '0123456789 .');
>
> I am feeling a bit boneheaded now. How easy things can be.
>
This would not work if the character string after the number started
with a number too.
EXAMPLE
<?php
$line = '017. 85 apples were sold to customer John Doe.';
# now ltrim would clearly cut off the '85 ' which belongs to the sentence.
var_dump(ltrim($line, '0123456789 .'));
?>
So if one still wanted the speedy string functions a simple trim() [1]
or another ltrim() [2] would have to be added.
EXAMPLE
<?php
$line = '017. 85 apples were sold to customer John Doe.';
var_dump(ltrim((ltrim($line, '0123456789.'), ' '));
?>
Still there is one flaw in this construct:
If there was no white space between the '017.' and the '85 apples ..'
we get the old mishap again.
EXAMPLE
<?php
$line = '017.85 apples were sold to customer John Doe.';
# note the difference above: '017.85 apples ...' this time
var_dump(ltrim((ltrim($line, '0123456789.'), ' '));
?>
To stick with the string functions one could either use the
strpos($line, '.') + substr() [3] method or do it with explode(),
implode() [4]:
EXAMPLE
<?
$line = '017.85 apples were sold to customer John Doe.';
$line = explode('.', $line);
unset($line[0]);
$line = implode('.', $line);
?>
So it seems that the regular expressions posted are not a bad choice after all.
//A yeti
[1] http://in.php.net/manual/en/function.trim.php
[2] http://in.php.net/manual/en/function.ltrim.php
[3] http://marc.info/?l=php-general&m=122580865009265&w=2
[4] http://in.php.net/manual/en/function.explode.php
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