Regular Expression PHP preg_match_all

Question

I'm a self-thought PHP beginner and I'm still learning regular expressions. Here is a problem i encountered with preg_match_all and arrays

my array has exactly the following information:

;;CARLOS||ANDREW||STEPH||SUE||JUDY||HAROLD||JAMES||KATIE||JESSICA;;

What i'm trying to do is display each name individually there are about 250 different names, the array always begins with ;; and always ends with ;; so here is my issue, first my array loads fine but only the first name by doing:

    preg_match_all('/^(.+?)\|\|/', $body, $part);
    foreach ($part[1] as $part){
    print_r($part);

Result is ;;CARLOS

Where $body is the huge list of names (array with 250+ names).

Desired result:

CARLOS
ANDREW
STEPH
JUDY
HAROLD
JAMES
KATIE
JESSICA

Please understand i cannot change the input array, it is what it is. So basically on the first array i have load the entire list then i need to break it by | characters.

Thanks for any advice.

Answer 1

No need to use regular expressions here. explode and trim will work just fine.

$str = trim($body, ";");    // Remove semi-colons
$arr = explode("||", $str); // Return array of strings delimited by double pipes

print_r($arr);

Output

Array
(
    [0] => CARLOS
    [1] => ANDREW
    [2] => STEPH
    [3] => SUE
    [4] => JUDY
    [5] => HAROLD
    [6] => JAMES
    [7] => KATIE
    [8] => JESSICA
)

See in action.

If you want your desired result exactly, then implode the above output.

echo implode(" ", $arr);
// Outputs: CARLOS ANDREW STEPH SUE JUDY HAROLD JAMES KATIE JESSICA

Answer 2

$list = explode('||',trim($list,';'));

Answer 3

;;CARLOS|| is the smallest match available, which is exactly what you're asking the regex engine to do. Try this regular expression:

preg_match_all('/(?<=\|\||;;)(.+?)(?=\|\||;;)/', $body, $part);

print_r($part[1]);

Answer 4

I would use explode() instead.

<?php

$string=";;CARLOS||ANDREW||STEPH||SUE||JUDY||HAROLD||JAMES||KATIE||JESSICA;;";

$names=explode("||", substr($string,2,strlen($string)-4));

print_r($names);

gives us:

Array
(
    [0] => CARLOS
    [1] => ANDREW
    [2] => STEPH
    [3] => SUE
    [4] => JUDY
    [5] => HAROLD
    [6] => JAMES
    [7] => KATIE
    [8] => JESSICA
)