Changing order of words in a string based on regex

[Joe Belmaati]

I didn't really know where to start searching for this, so if already covered, then many apologies.

I am dealing with some large text files that contain lots of wine tasting notes. I am trying to come up with a clever construct that will enable me to shift a word in a line to the beginning of the line based on a regex that will identify a year. This is what I've come up with and it seems to work, however, I'm sure there's a better way. Any ideas..?

$string = 'Latour Pauillac 1995 Bordeaux';
$wine = explode(' ', $string);
for ($i = 0; $i < count($wine); $i++)
{
if (preg_match('#\d{4}#', $wine[$i]))
{
echo $wine[$i] . ' ';
}
}
for ($i = 0; $i < count($wine); $i++)
{
echo preg_replace('#\d{4}#', '', $wine[$i]) . ' ';
}

[coopster]

I'm not sure what you are going for ... but if it is working, go with it ;)

$string = 'Latour Pauillac 1995 Bordeaux'; 
print preg_replace("/(.*) (\d{4}) (.*)/", "$2 $1 $3", $string);

[Joe Belmaati]

Hi,
thank you very much for the code. It works as long as the year is the third element in the array in which case I guess

echo $wine[2] . ' ' . $wine[0] . ' ' . $wine[1] . ' ' . $wine[3];

would also work. The problem is that the text strings are formatted differently. In some strings the year will be the second element, in other it'll be the third, and so on...

[coopster]

The regex offered here will find it no matter where it is and move it to the front of the string. I'm not certain if that was what you were looking for, but if not you could modify the regular expression accordingly.

[Joe Belmaati]

That does not seem to be the case. If I change the string to

$string = 'Latour Pauillac Bordeaux 1995';

The output is:

Latour Pauillac Bordeaux 1995

[jd01]

It looks like you may need to make the spaces optional, or remove them because if the number is at the beginning or the end of the string, the pattern will not match spaceNUMNUMNUMNUMspace.

$string = 'Latour Pauillac 1995 Bordeaux';
print preg_replace("/(.*)\s?(\d{4})\s?(.*)/", "$2 $1 $3", $string);

If you wanted to be sure you only matched four numbers by themselves, you might use the boundary flag:

$string = 'Latour Pauillac 1995 Bordeaux';
print preg_replace("/(.*)\s?(\b\d{4}\b)\s?(.*)/", "$2 $1 $3", $string);

Hope this helps.

Justin

[Joe Belmaati]

Yes,
that works flawlessly :D Thank you very much!
Joe