PHP and regex question .

[anshul]

Hi friends,

I require little help with PHP regex.

I've a whole dump of text:

I wanna count occurence of _L_ in it. I did it easily.

_L_ is 100 times in it.

I wanna get occurence of 'www.example.com' in dump text, if found, stop and return counted value of _L_ like 23rd _L_ or 59th _L_ or 95th _L_

How can this be done using PHP and regex?
There may be more than one occurence of 'www.example.com'

[ergophobe]

I don't think you can do it with a straight regex. I think you'll need to get the values into an array using preg_match() and then loop through the array for a count. Could be wrong. Something like:

function countLs($subject) 
{ 
  $pattern = '/(_L_¦www\.example\.com)/'; // retype the pipe! 
  $found = preg_match($pattern, $subject, $matches); 
  if (!$found) 
  { 
    return 0; 
  } 
  $size = count($matches); 
  $count = 0; 
  $continue = true; 
  while ($count < $size && $continue) 
  { 
    if ($matches[$count] == 'www.example.com') 
    { 
      $continue = false; 
    } 
    else 
    { 
      $count++; 
    } 
  } 
  return $count; 
}