将字符串中的正则表达式转换为数组

Question

I'm new to regular expressions in PHP so I was wondering how would I split the below soe that all "somethings" are stored in an array?

$string = "something here (9), something here2 (20), something3 (30)";

Desired result:

$something_array = array(
[0] => something 
[1] => something2
[2] => something3 ) 

Basically removing "," and whatever are in the brackets.

Answer 1

The regular expression would be something like this: (.*?) \\([^)]*\\),? It uses . (anything) because you requested so, but if it's a word you should use \\w instead, or if it's anything but whitespace \\S so it would be something like this: (\\S*) \\([^)]*\\),?

Explaining the expression:

• (.*?) - match anything, but in lazy mode, or 'as little as possible' mode
• [^)]* - match anything but ) as many as possible
• \\([^)]*\\) - match a pair of brackets and it's content
• ,? - match a comma if it's there

You can test it all these HERE

Finally, using the preg_match_all PHP function, this would look something like this:

$str = 'something (this1), something2 (this2), something3 (this3)';
preg_match_all('/(\S*) \([^)]*\),?/', $str, $matches);
print_r($matches);

Answer 2

I wouldn't use regular expressions for something like this, but rather just PHP's explode() function.

$parts = explode(', ', $string);
$result = array_map(function($element) {
    return substr($element, 0, strrpos($element, ' '));
}, $parts);
print_r($result);

The above would output

Array
(
    [0] => something here
    [1] => something here2
    [2] => something3
)