We have a field in a database (of a Laravel 5.4 site) that has cells with data like this:
"123(Description of 123) 124(Description of 124) 125(Description of 125)"
All in one long string. I need to output the bracketed text but only of the specified number. For example, pass the number 123 as a parameter and Description of 123 is returned.
I have the regex pattern to use with preg_match that extracts the data from the brackets:
$sTest = "247(text goes here)248(more here)";
preg_match("/\(([^\)]*)\)/", $sTest, $aMatches);
$sResult = $aMatches[1];
But I don't know how to instruct PHP to read the specific brackets after a certain number.
Does anyone have any suggestions please? Many thanks in advance!
While redesigning the DB might look like a fix, a current work around is to pass the ID of the bracketed data as part of the regex pattern.
Consider this snippet:
$id = 248;
$sTest = "247(text goes here)248(more here)";
preg_match("/\b" . $id . "\(([^\)]*)\)/", $sTest, $aMatches);
$sResult = $aMatches[1];
echo $sResult;
Here, \b is a word boundary to match a number as a whole word (so as not to match 1 in 21) and $id becomes part of the pattern (but since you only get the contents of the first capturing group with $aMatches[1], it is only used as context, and not part of the extraction).