CODEWITHSUNDEEP
phpregex
swg1cor14
swg1cor14

Reputation: 1722

Find text before phone number in string regex PHP

So I have this list of strings given to me as follows:

David palmer & Betsy Harrell 229-548-9651 Emily

I know how to get the phone number out of that string by doing this:

preg_match_all('/[0-9]{3}[\-][0-9]{3}[\-][0-9]{4}/', $text, $matches);
$matches = $matches[0];

But I need to get the name before hand AND the phone number. This is a bit beyond my regex knowledge. So I need

David palmer & Betsy Harrell

and

229-548-9651

Upvotes: 1

Views: 65

Answers (1)

Wiktor Stribiżew
Wiktor Stribiżew

Reputation: 627110

Use capturing groups to get two substrings:

$s = 'David palmer & Betsy Harrell 229-548-9651 Emily';
if (preg_match('~^(.*?)\s*(\d{3}-\d{3}-\d{4})~', $s, $m)) {
  echo $m[1] . "\n" . $m[2];
}

See PHP demo.

Pattern details:

  • ^ - start of string
  • (.*?) - any 0+ chars other than line break chars as few as possible up to the first...
  • \s* - 0+ whitespaces
  • (\d{3}-\d{3}-\d{4}) - date pattern (3 digits, -, 3 digits, -, 4 digits).

Note you do not need to put - into a character class, and no need to escape it outside a character class. \d is equal to [0-9] if you do not use any specific modifiers/PCRE verbs related to Unicode.

Upvotes: 1

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