James_S

Reasons why i'm doing this: 1. Emailing customers and ask to update is not an option. Maybe 10% will do it? 95% are one-time-customers - i wouldn't bother my self if i got such email - at least not until next time i shop there. And i really don't like emailing customers without good reasons (such email is close to what i call spam: emails you delete pretty instantly). But of course - next time i will email my customers, i will ask them to ALSO double check their addresses. 2. It's not a dissaster if the columns for address, zip or city are not perfect. The fields are not related to other tables with possible values (for instance a table of all existing zips) that needs to be matched. So no matter what i do, there will always be errors in the database, for instance because of typos in address users enter. 3. It's better to have 10% fields "not perfect" (and 90% perfect), than leaving everything completely out? 4. No, i will not double check the results, because of reason #2. :) I will do a try on the whole database afterwords, and do a quick scan over the results to see if i find any obvious faults. My guess is that at least 90% will be perfect. I've spent approx 2 hours on this project now, and i'm pretty sure that i would spend at least 100 hours to do this manually!

Of course, the new database is done properly, and form have all fields, and they are properly validated before insert. I just want to transfer the old data to the new database. I have made a fairly good solution now: [code] <?php $address = "Thestreet 123 ,    3131 MYPLACE,COUNTRY"; //formatting messed up on purpose $cutLinefeeds = str_replace ( "\r\n", "", $address); $cutCommas = str_replace ( ",", " ", $cutLinefeeds); $cutSpaces = preg_replace('/\s\s+/', ' ', $cutCommas); preg_match('/[0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9]/i',$cutSpaces, $zip); $theZip = $zip[0]; if(!empty($theZip)) { $adressArray = explode(" ", $cutSpaces); $index = array_search($theZip, $adressArray); $city = $adressArray[$index+1]; $streetArray = array_slice($adressArray, 0, $index); $street = trim(implode(" ", $streetArray)); } else $street = $cutSpaces; echo "Street: $street<br>"; echo "Zip: $theZip<br>"; echo "City: $city<br>"; ?>[/code] Comments: - First i'm removing linefeeds and commas, so that every part have only a space between. - I assume that city will always come right after the zip. - I assume that if theres anything after city, it'is garbage. Usually theres nothing, but theres something it's always(?) country. Since all my customers are from same country, I don't need it. The most obvious bug i find now, is that if the street address also contains 4 digits, it will assume that is the zip. Does anyone have any other suggestions/improvements? Thanks!

I guess you are assuming that the formating will always be the same there. Unfortunately, it is not... Sometimes the entire field will be empty, sometimes normal address without zip/country, sometimes even more details etc. I'm pretty sure that the only way to be sure that there is a zip code in the string, is to actually search for 4 digits. Thanks for all reaplies though. Fast responses here  :o

I'm not sure i want to do that since it's my customers real addresses... But the content shouldn't matter the function works like i wrote in words: - Search the string for a 4-digit number and "cut" this and save to $zip instead - If the 4 digit zip was found, the next word is for sure "place", so this should also be cut and saved to $place. If zip was not found, don't do this. (- trim the string, and replace linefeeds with commas.)

[quote author=redarrow link=topic=106443.msg425732#msg425732 date=1157086534] hard code it. blue fingers. [/quote] I think you misunderstand. I'm not trying to fix user input when it's being posted - then i would of course have separated these fields on the form instead. I already have 10 000 records, that i need to convert. So i need to create a function, so that i can loop through all records and apply it.

Long time ago when i created my first database, i thought it was smart to store address, zip code, and city as one string in one DB-field. Now i have created a new database and splitted these into seperate fields. But i would really want to transfer the old data into the new database. Does anyone have a suggestion how i would achieve this: //current - note that it may contain line feeds, or commas. $address = "Thestreet 123 3131 MYPLACE COUNTRY"; //wanted $address = "Thestreet 123, COUNTRY" (for the ease, i can live with the country thing still being there) $zip = "3131" $place = "MYPLACE" In words: - Search for a 4-digit number and "cut" this and save to $zip instead - If zip is found, the next word is "place", so this should also be cut and saved to $place (- trim the string, and replace linefeeds with commas.) Note: The original address string varies a lot, since users entered this by them selves. So it's not always the same format, thus making it harder to solve... If someone wants to help me, i would be really thankful.