CODEWITHSUNDEEP
phpregex
Ben
Ben

Reputation: 11188

Regex to get the first number after a certain string followed by any data until the number

I have a piece of data, retrieved from the database and containing information I need. Text is entered in a free form so it's written in many different ways. The only thing I know for sure is that I'm looking for the first number after a given string, but after that certain string (before the number) can be any text as well.

I tried this (where mytoken is the string I know for sure its there) but this doesn't work.

/(mytoken|MYTOKEN)(.*)\d{1}/
/(mytoken|MYTOKEN)[a-zA-Z]+\d{1}/
/(mytoken|MYTOKEN)(.*)[0-9]/
/(mytoken|MYTOKEN)[a-zA-Z]+[0-9]/

Even mytoken can be written in capitals, lowercase or a mix of capitals and lowercase character. Can the expression be case insensitive?

Upvotes: 5

Views: 9355

Answers (3)

Jan
Jan

Reputation: 43169

You can use the opposite:

/(mytoken|MYTOKEN)(\D+)(\d)/

This says: mytoken, followed by anything not a number, followed by a number. The (lazy) dot-star-soup is not always your best bet. The desired number will be in $3 in this example.

Upvotes: 2

Wiktor Stribiżew
Wiktor Stribiżew

Reputation: 626870

You do not need any lazy matching since you want to match any number of non-digit symbols up to the first digit. It is better done with a \D*:

/(mytoken)(\D*)(\d+)/i

See the regex demo

The pattern details:

  • (mytoken) - Group 1 matching mytoken (case insensitively, as there is a /i modifier)
  • (\D*) - Group 2 matching zero or more characters other than a digit
  • (\d+) - Group 3 matching 1 or more digits.

Note that \D also matches newlines, . needs a DOTALL modifier to match across newlines.

Upvotes: 7

Lucas Araujo
Lucas Araujo

Reputation: 1688

You need to use a lazy quantifier. You can do that by putting a question mark after the star quantifier in the regex: .*?. Otherwise, the numbers will be matched by the dot operator until the last number, which will be matched by \d.

Regex: /(mytoken|MYTOKEN)(.*?)\d/

Regex demo

Upvotes: 2

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