Find Wildcard

Identifying the wildcard content

[haamro]

Hi there,

I'm trying to retrieve the information from the text file using wildcard, but could not think of any idea on how to start. Can someone help me out.

I have a set of data on text file{shown below}, and i want to search it using wild card and then retrieve the data from there.

Text File is in this format:

NIDStart-23423-NIDEnd VIDStart-53453-VIDEnd NIDStart-24563-NIDEnd VIDStart-07983-VIDEnd NIDStart-12323-NIDEnd

Input: NIDStart-*-NIDEnd

Output:
23423
24563
12323

[eelixduppy]

Gonna have to use regular expressions for this one:

$pattern = "/NIDStart-(\d+)-NIDEnd/";
$matches = array();
[url=http://www.php.net/preg_match]preg_match[/url]($pattern, $string, $matches);
echo '<pre>'; print_r($matches); echo '</pre>';

try this. Oh, and Welcome to WebmasterWorld! :)

[haamro]

Hi eelixduppy, thank u for ur reply, it worked with charm.

I slightly tried to modify it, but i can't get it the way i wanted

1. I tried to built the $pattern by using str_replace, that replaced all the * of the $query with "(\w+)" and added "/" to either end

This worked very well, but $query="NIDStart*NIDEnd*Test"; didn't work and I had to use $query="NIDStart-*-NIDEnd-*-Test"; though i was expecting the output with "-" sign

2. Can i run similar query with HTML tag ?
eg: $query="<table border=1>*</table> to get everything between that tag ? It didn't work for me either

<?php

$string="NIDStart-23a423-NIDEnd-222-Test NIDStart-24563-NIDEnd-555-Test NIDStart-12323-NIDEnd ";

$query="NIDStart-*-NIDEnd-*-Test";
$pattern=(str_replace("*","(\w+)",$query));
$pattern="/" . $pattern . "/";

$matches = array();
preg_match_all($pattern, $string, $matches);

foreach ($matches[0] as $item) {
echo ($item)."<hr/>";
}

?>

[eelixduppy]

>> \w+

You should be using \d+, otherwise it looks like it should work. Also, just in case you change your query to something with characters that need to be escaped, it should read like this:

$pattern = '/' . str_replace("*", "(\w+)", [url=http://www.php.net/preg-quote]preg_quote[/url]($query, '/')) . '/'; 

>> Can i run similar query with HTML tag ?

Yes you can. Using the updated code above the preg_quote should properly escape the HTML and it should work. Try it out.