Parsing information from strings

[soadlink]

Hello,

Before I ask this quick question, I'll just mention that i did search google and the forums, but did not find exactly what i was looking for, so here goes:

I am looking for a method to parse an email address out of a string of data. Since email addresses can be various legnths, I dont think using something like substr() will work. Is there a method to pull out a string of data using 'before' and 'after' strings?

For example a string can look like this: [i][b]5345345534883\email\[email protected]\sig\[/b][/i]

So I'm looking for something that could use '\email\' as a before, and \sig\ as an after, and pull out whatever is in the middle of that. In this case, it would be the email.

Im sure there is a particular function to do that, I just dont know what it is  ???

Thanks for the help!

[Wintergreen]

My method, while logical in my head, doesn't work ;)

[soadlink]

Thanks for replying anyway 8). I was tinkering around with it before your post edit and couldnt get it to work myself.

[Wintergreen]

Well, the explode works except for the fact that what you need to break it up by us an escape character, \ .
Then, array_search apparently only returns a key value if the search string (@) is the entire entry, not just present in it. 

So hopefully someone else has something

[soadlink]

Wintergreen,

Thank you very much. I actually figured it out with explode. For every \, I actually needed to specify it as 2 backslashes \\.

My code ended up being:

[code]
$array = explode("\\", $third);
echo $array[10];[/code]

$third being the string I was exploding. "\\" was to explode it at every \ in that string.
And the 10 is because the 10th instance of a "\" in my string is where the email is.

Thanks again for the helping!

[Wintergreen]

Guess it works as long as all your search strings are set up the same way :)

[effigy]

[code]
<pre>
<?php

echo $string = '5345345534883\email\[email protected]\sig\\';
preg_match('/(?<=\\\email\\\)(.+?)(?=\\\sig\\\)/', $string, $matches);
array_shift($matches);
print_r($matches);

?>
</pre>
[/code]

[Barand]

or
[code]<?php
function emailFilter($item) {return strpos($item, '@');}

$string = "5345345534883\\email\\[email protected]\\sig\\";
$x = array_filter(explode('\\', $string), 'emailFilter');
echo current($x);
?>[/code]