Quick regex pattern in PHP

Question

I have a large string chunk of text, and I need to extract all occurrences of text matching the following pattern:

QXXXXX-X (where X can be any digit, 0-9).

How do I do this in PHP?

<?php
preg_match_all("","Q05546-8 XXX Q13323-0",$output,PREG_PATTERN_ORDER);
print_r($output);
?>

Answer 1

Here you go:

preg_match_all('/\bQ[0-9]{5}-[0-9]\b/',"Q05546-8 XXX Q13323-0",$output,PREG_PATTERN_ORDER);
print_r($output);

Or, you can use shorthand class \\d for a digit: \\bQ\\d{5}-\\d\\b .

Regex explanation :

• \\b - Word boundary (we are either at the beginning of between a word character ( [a-zA-Z0-9_] ) and a non-word one (all others)
• Q - Literal case-sensitive Q
• [0-9]{5} - Exactly 5 (due to {5} ) digits from 0 to 5 range
• - - Literal hyphen
• [0-9] - Exactly 1 digit from 0 to 5
• \\b - Again a word boundary.

If you have these values inside longer sequences, you may consider using \\bQ[0-9]{5}-[0-9](?![0-9]) or using shorthand classes, \\bQ\\d{5}-\\d(?!\\d) .

Output of the demo :

Array
(
    [0] => Array
        (
            [0] => Q05546-8
            [1] => Q13323-0
        )

)