How to extract only first alphabetical characters from a string

[geroido]

Hi

I have entries in my database that look like the following:

 

lynnie20080825122012

geroido20080825105322

lynnie20080825112208

geroido20080825122526

 

They are all unique entries. What I want to do is to extract only the first alphabetical part of the string and nothing else. So I would end up with:

 

lynnie

geroido

lynnie

geroido

 

Any ideas how I might do this?

 

[Fadion]

I'm a total noob in regular expressions, but this should do it:

 

<?php
$str = 'lynnie20080825122012';
$str = preg_replace('/[0-9]/', '', $str);
echo $str;
?>

[geroido]

Hi Guiltygear

Can you explain what this is doing exactly

Thanks

 

<?php
$str = 'lynnie20080825122012';
$str = preg_replace('/[0-9]/', '', $str);
echo $str;
?>

[Fadion]

Sure . It is just replacing every number in the string with nothing. The regular expression is doing that, searching and replacing every number ([0-9]), leaving just the text.

[Fadion]

Ok as you get the data from a database, i'm going for a full example:

 

<?php
$results = mysql_query("SELECT username FROM users");
while($values = mysql_fetch_array($results)){
     $user = preg_replace('/[0-9]/', '', $values['user']);
     echo $user;
}
?>

[geroido]

Hi Gulitygear

I just tested that and it works brilliantly. Thanks a lot

geroido

[Fadion]

Glad to hear that. Please mark the topic as solved if you don't have anymore questions.