Splitting a string that contains words and numbers

Question

I have a sports score. I need to split it up into teams and scores, but the problem is sometimes teams have more than one word in their names for instance:

$str = "New Mexico State 75 Alabama 84 FINAL";

I have tried things like:

$arr= preg_split("/[\s]+/", $str);

Which just splits by space, which is not what I want. I need the output to be:

$arr[0] = 'New Mexico State';
$arr[1] = '75';
$arr[2] = 'Alabama';
$arr[3] = '84';

Answer 1

Try this

  $str = "New Mexico State 75 Alabama 84 FINAL";
  $arr= preg_split('/(?<=\D)(?=\d)|\d+\K/', $str);
  print_r($arr);

this will output

Array ( [0] => New Mexico State [1] => 75 [2] => Alabama [3] => 84 [4] => FINAL )

Answer 2

The solution using preg_match_all function:

$str = "New Mexico State 75 Alabama 84 FINAL";
preg_match_all("/(\D+)((?:\d+\b))/", $str, $matches, PREG_SET_ORDER);

$result = [];
foreach ($matches as $m) {
    $result[] = trim($m[1]);
    $result[] = $m[2];
}

print_r($result);

The output:

Array
(
    [0] => New Mexico State
    [1] => 75
    [2] => Alabama
    [3] => 84
)