I have many headlines in my project like:
00.00.2014 - Headline Description e.t.c.
I want to check with php if the given strings contain the format 00.00.0000 - in front. The part after the - doesn't matter.
Can someone help me with something like:
$format = '00.00.0000 -';
if ($string MATCHES $format IN FRONT) {
// ...some code...
}
This should work:
if (preg_match("/^\d{2}\.\d{2}\.\d{4}\s\-\s.*$/", $string) === 1) {
// $string matches!
}
Explanation:
^ is "the beginning of the string"\d is any digit (0, 1, 2, ..., 9){n} means "repeated n times"\. is a dot\s is a space\- is a minus sign. is "any single character"* means "repeated 0 or more times`$ means "end of the string"Use the strpos function. Something like this:
if (strpos($string,'00.00.0000 -') !== true) {
//some code
}
I don't have a dev environment to test this out on but i'll give you some psuedocode:
I'm unsure of the context, but you can test this function on any given STRING:
Function:
Boolean hasCorrectFormat($myString){
//Here take the string and cut it into a char array.
$charArray = str_split($myString);
//This will give you a char array. Compare the first 12 elements of this
//array to see if they are correct. If its supposed to be number make
//sure it is, if its supposed to be a "." make sure it is..etc
//"00.00.0000 -" is 12 characters.
if(!isNumeric(charArray[0])){
return false;
}
else if(!isNumeric(charArray[1])){
return false;
}
else if(charArray[2] != "."){
return false;
}
//so on and so forth.....
else {return true}
}
Like i said i can't test this, and i can almost guarantee you this code wont run. This should give you the logic involved though.
Edit: also i wrote this assuming you dont literally mean "00.00.0000" but rather "xx.xx.xxxx" x being any number 0-9. If you need to make sure it is literally zeros then just cut your string to be the first ten chars and compare it.