PHP: extract email and name from data file

Question

I need to extract the name and the e-mail from one data file. the file contains more than 500 lines and I want to extract this two informations almost all the data. I would like to use preg_match_all, but my function doesn't work ...

  $chaine =
"  -----------------
11/21/12 16:06:54 tcp static-qvn-qvt-127041
MAIL toto1@web.com
NAME tata1
 -----------------
11/21/12 16:06:54 tcp static-qvn-qvt-127041
MAIL toto2@web.com
NAME tata2
 *  -----------------
11/21/12 16:06:54 tcp static-qvn-qvt-127041
MAIL toto3@web.com
NAME tata3
";

//$chaine =" #76:50#89:1#86:50#49:1#84:22";
$motif="/MAIL([a-z]{2,4}+)NAME([a-z]{2,4}+)/";
preg_match_all($motif,$chaine,$out);
$nb=count($out[0]);
for($i=0;$i<$nb;$i++)
{
    echo $out[0][$i].'<br/>';
}

Answer 1

"s" modifier add support for multiline.

Your regexp would be look like this:

$motif="/MAIL\s*([a-z]{2,4}).*?NAME\s*([a-z]{2,4})/s";

Answer 2

I feel like regex might be a bit overkill for what you're doing.

Why don't you simply read line by line, explode (documentation here ) with spaces as a delimiter, then check if the first item is "MAIL", or if it is "NAME", then use the second item, otherwise discard the line?

Here's an example code that does it:

foreach(preg_split("/((\r?\n)|(\r\n?))/", $chaine) as $line)
{
    $segments = explode(' ', $line);
    if($segments[0] === "MAIL")
        echo "Found mail " . $segments[1] . "\n";
    elseif($segments[0] === "NAME")
        echo "Found name " . $segments[1] . "\n";
}