如何从PHP中的API调用的纯文本响应中获取数据?

I'm getting API response in plain text. I need to grab data from that text response and need to store them as variables.

API Calling:

  $url="http://91.101.61.111:99/SendRequest/?mobile=9999999999&id=11011&reqref=501";
  $request_timeout = 60;
  $ch = curl_init();
  curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
  curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_TIMEOUT, $request_timeout);
  curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT, $request_timeout);
  curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
  $output = curl_exec($ch);
  $curl_error = curl_errno($ch);
  curl_close($ch);  

API response in plain text:

REQUEST ACCEPTED your ref=501 system_reference=BA01562    

I need to grab data from the above plain text response as variables, like below:

$status = "REQUEST ACCEPTED";  
$myref = "501";  
$sysref = "BA01562";  

I have tried:

$explode1 = explode(" ", $output);      
$explode2 = explode("=", $explode1[3]);
$explode3 = explode("=", $explode1[4]);

$status = $explode1[0]." ".$explode1[1];
$myref = $explode2[1];
$sysref = $explode3[1];

I know this is not a proper way to do this. But I am not able to figure out the proper way to do it since I'm a newbie.

Please help! Thank you!

you can use a preg_match, something like:

$rc = preg_match('/([\w\s]+) your ref=([\d]+) system_reference=([\w]+)/', $plain_response, $matches);
if ($rc)
{
    $status = $matches[1];  
    $myref = $matches[2];  
    $sysref = $matches[3];  
}

but of course, just as @Don't panic said, you need a bit more knowledge of the API, to be sure about parsing. The example i gived is a bit childish. Anyway, when you will be sure about the format, use regexp with preg_match.