Newbie to PHP

[brandoncordell]

I'm a newb when it comes to PHP. I've been trying to learn for a year or two, but it's only been recently that I've been putting my mind to really learning. It's sometimes hard for me to understand concepts after just reading a tutorial or book, so I make "real world applications" like address books etc.

 

Is there a better way to write this line.

 

echo '<td>' . '(' . substr($row['number'], 0, 3) . ')' . substr($row['number'], 3, 3) . '-' . substr($row['number'], 6, 4) . '</td>';

(I'm trying to format a ten digit phone number into this format (555)123-1234 )

 

 

note:

I'm learning MySQL techniques at the moment. I'm querying my database to pull a phone number (stored in a 10 character long VARCHAR, so just numbers 5551231234).

 

[RussellReal]

echo '('.substr($row['number'],0,3).')'.substr($row['number'],3,3).'-'.substr($row['number'],6,4);

 

should work

[kenrbnsn]

You can do something like this:

<?php
echo preg_replace("/([0-9a-zA-Z]{3})([0-9a-zA-Z]{3})([0-9a-zA-Z]{4})/", "($1)$2-$3", $row['number']);
?>

 

I found this by doing a Google search...

 

Ken

[brandoncordell]

echo '('.substr($row['number'],0,3).')'.substr($row['number'],3,3).'-'.substr($row['number'],6,4);

 

should work

 

is there a better technique to retrieve certain parts of $row['number']? Reading through the PHP manual, substr seemed like the best, but then again I'm new  Is this something regex could do for me?

[RussellReal]

ken, what kinda regex is that

 

if you're gonna go with regex use this:

 

preg_replace("/^(\d{3})(\d{3})(\d{4})$/",'($1)$2-$3',$row['number']);

 

--- Edit

 

substr and strpos are really actually very fast

 

I prefer using those two functions when parsing rather than regex, the above portion of this post is just to follow up on what ken said

[kenrbnsn]

The line I posted was taken from this post: http://snipplr.com/view/3680/format-phone/

 

Ken