CODEWITHSUNDEEP
phpregexpcre
null
null

Reputation: 7594

Using a regular expression to match each individual character as it's own group?

In PHP I'm trying to match each character as its own group. Which would mimic the str_split(). I tried:

$string = '123abc456def';
preg_match_all('/(.)*/', $string, $array);
// $array = array(2) { 
//   [0]=>  array(2) { 
//      [0]=>  string(12) "123abc456def"
//      [1]=>  string(0) "" } 
//   [1]=>  array(2) { [0]=>  string(1) "f" [1]=>  string(0) "" } }

I was expecting something like:

//$array = array(2) { 
//   [0]=> string(12) "123abc456def", 
//   [1]=> array(12) { 
//       [0]=>  string(1) "1", [1]=> string(1) "2"
//       ... 
//       [10]=> string(1) "e", [11]=> string(1) "f" } }

The reason I want to use the regular expression instead of a str_split() is because the regex will be the basis of another regex.

Upvotes: 0

Views: 774

Answers (4)

tanaydin
tanaydin

Reputation: 5316

i don't know if this helps for this station but you can access letters of a string like array.. so

<?php
$a = "hede";
print $a[0] . "\n";
print $a[1] . "\n";
print $a[2] . "\n";
print $a[3] . "\n";
?>

will output

h

e

d

e

Upvotes: 0

Gumbo
Gumbo

Reputation: 655239

Try this:

preg_match_all('/./s', $str, $matches)

This does also match line break characters.

Upvotes: 2

Adi
Adi

Reputation: 556

Maybe this is what you are looking for:

preg_match_all('/(.)+?/', $string, $array);

Upvotes: 0

alphadogg
alphadogg

Reputation: 12900

The * outside the parens means you want to repeat the capturing group. (This means you will only capture the last iteration.) Try a global match of any single character, like this:

preg_match_all('/(.)/', $subject, $result, PREG_PATTERN_ORDER);
$result = $result[0];

Upvotes: 4

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