count only commas outside parenteses

[LMarie]

 

I have a sql table containing

id - query - query name

the first page contains a drop down menu of all the query names. When chosen the user is sent to a page that prints the result of the query in a html table.

 

Now i nees to find how many rows the table should have.

 

This counts how many rows i need in the table:

^{$parts=explode(' FROM ',$query);}

^{$count=explode(",", $parts[0]);}

^{$result=count($count);}

But the problem is that here i explode by commas but the query also contains commas like this: substring (***,19,10) as Part1

 

My question is how do i count only commas outside these parenteses.

 

something like this:

 

$var=0;

start counting commas in parts[0],

when ( accures increase $var to 1,

if $var = 1 dont count commas,

but when ) accures set $var to 0,

and start counting again

 

The reason why im making it this way is that it's suppose to be possible to just add a query to the sql table no matter how many rows this query needs in output.

 

Any ideas?

[cags]

Can you give an example query that causes problems along with the expected comma count?

[LMarie]

When a query contains substring

 

example:

^{SELECT LastName, SUBSTRING(FirstName, 1, 1) AS Initial}

^{FROM Person.Contact}

^{WHERE LastName like 'Ba%'}

^{ORDER BY LastName;[/sub]}

[cags]

Assumably the only place unwanted commas will appear will be inside function calls. How about using preg_replace to take them out of the string before counting the commas.

 

preg_replace("#\([^)]*\)#", "", $input);