Strip out letters using PHP

[weightinwildcat]

I am trying to tke letters out of some alphanumeric strings in a MySQL table. Right now I have code to query my table and write the results into a tab-delimited text file. The problem somes in when I try to use SUBSTR and other related functions to get rid of the letters.

Here is what part of a column might look like:

1000
W200
1300E
N1235S
N3N10200
I am trying to shave off any trailing letters or preceding letters. For those entries that look like N3W10200 I would like to be able to use Explode to get the numerical values and add them, but I need to be able to use the string functions effectively. Any thoughts as to what I am missing?

The output would look like this:

1000
200
1300
1235
10203

Have a great day.

 

[vacunita]

Regular Expressions are your friend in this case.

$val="N1235S";
$pattern='/([A-Z])/'; 
$result=preg_replace($pattern,"",$val);
echo $result; [green]//1235[/green]

----------------------------------
Phil AKA Vacunita
----------------------------------
Ignorance is not necessarily Bliss, case in point:
Unknown has caused an Unknown Error on Unknown and must be shutdown to prevent damage to Unknown.

Behind the Web, Tips and Tricks for Web Development.

http://behindtheweb.blogspot.com/

 

[jpadie]

not sure how a regex would help with this one

N3N10200
becomes
10203

mind you, I'm not sure what would help with that - I can't see the logic that would allow us to establish a pattern.

 

[weightinwildcat]

In this case we are talking about addresses and house numbers, like one might find in some outlying areas.

 

[vacunita]

I think what jpadie means is how or why does the 3 between then N's in the original alphanumeric string N3N10200, move to the position of the last zero for the result 10203.

In other words, wouldn't N3N10200 become [red]3[/red]10200 rather than 1020[red]3[/red]

----------------------------------
Phil AKA Vacunita
----------------------------------
Ignorance is not necessarily Bliss, case in point:
Unknown has caused an Unknown Error on Unknown and must be shutdown to prevent damage to Unknown.

Behind the Web, Tips and Tricks for Web Development.

http://behindtheweb.blogspot.com/

 

[weightinwildcat]

Not in this case; the idea is to have addition of the two numbers rather than concatenation. This needs to be done so I can merge the data set with another data set.

I have tried different things, like SUBSTR, RIGHT, and so on. So far, no luck. Not only do these commands not seem to work like I want, they do not seem to be doing ANYTHING in this situation. Very puzzling.

 

[prex1]

$val="N3N10200";
$pattern='/(\d+)/'; 
$result=preg_match_all($pattern,$val,$matches);
if($result)echo array_sum($matches);

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[jpadie]

if you want more precise assistance please be more precise about the business rules you wish to implement.

 

[weightinwildcat]

Your code works really well. But I need to fine tune it.

What I need is to:

1 - Remove any leading letters (say, from N200W14500);
2 - Remove any trailing letters (say, from 1400SW);
3 - If there is a letter in the middle somewhere (200W14500, for instance), split the numbers (so I have would 200 and 14500), and then add them together (to get in this case 14700).

The business logic is hard to explain, but I am trying to merge two sets of data. There are equivalent fields in the sets for address ranges, but one uses letters and one does not.

 

[vacunita]

O.k, how about this:

<?PHP
$val="N200W14500K";
$pattern='/([A-Z])/'; 
$result=preg_replace($pattern," ",$val);
echo $result . "<br>";
$sum=0;
$parts=explode(" ",$result);
foreach($parts as $part){
echo $part . "<br>";
$sum+=$part;
}

echo $sum;

This will replace any letters in your string with a space instead, upon which you can explode the numbers into an array, and then add them if there are more than one.

----------------------------------
Phil AKA Vacunita
----------------------------------
Ignorance is not necessarily Bliss, case in point:
Unknown has caused an Unknown Error on Unknown and must be shutdown to prevent damage to Unknown.

Behind the Web, Tips and Tricks for Web Development.

http://behindtheweb.blogspot.com/

 

[jpadie]

this might work

<?php

$t = array(
'1000',
'W200',
'1300E',
'N1235S',
'N3N10200');
foreach($t as $item):
	echo "$item => ". weirdMatching($item) . "<br/>";
endforeach;


function weirdMatching($item){
	$pattern = '/^\D*(\d+)\D*(\d*)$/';
	preg_match($pattern, $item, $match);
	if ($match[2]):
		return $match[1] + $match[2];
	else:
		return $match[1];
	endif;
}

 

[weightinwildcat]

Thank you all for the feedback. I was able to adapt some of the code that was posted, and it works just fine.