On Thu, 2009-02-26 at 10:09 -0500, Alice Wei wrote: > Hi, > > I have two lines here as follows: > > 1 -0.123701962557954E+03 0.460967618024691E+02 > -0.123547659000000E+03 0.462591090000000E+02 > > What I am trying to do here is to only have > > 1 -0.123701962557954E+03 0.460967618024691E+02 be the output so I can do further processing with it, however, with the code I have in the following, I have both lines in the output. Here is the code: > > $file = "test.txt"; > $fp = fopen($file, "r"); > $lines = file($file); > > foreach($lines as $line_num => $line) > { > if (preg_match("/([^0-9]+\s+)(\-?\d+\.?\d+(\+?E?\d+)?){2}/", $line)) > > echo $line; > > } > > Could anyone please tell me that even when I specify that the line has to start with [^0-9]+\s with one occurrence, why I still get -0.123547659000000E+03 0.462591090000000E+02? > > Thanks a lot for your help. > > Alice > > > _________________________________________________________________ > Express yourself with gadgets on Windows Live Spaces > http://discoverspaces.live.com?source=hmtag1&loc=us what about a regex something like: /^(\d{1,})\s+([\d\.E\+\-])+\s+([\d\.E\+\-])+$/ The brackets () allow you to then extract the specific portions of the string as you wish, so the first match is the whole line, the second is the 1 (or whatever other number), the third is the first floating-point number, etc. I'm assuming that the 1 here is some sort of line number possibly? The bit inside the curly braces ({1,}) just says to match the digit 1 or more times. You can limit it by adding a number after the comma, so {1,3} for 1-3 digits. Hope this helps? Ash www.ashleysheridan.co.uk -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php