Preg_Match Help

[alecthorne]

I have the following array within a field 'elements'.

 

"b832581e-ef49-4cbf-a89b-7d67aa363e94": {

"0": {

"value": "Great Yarmouth"

}

},

"c74a0dba-5307-4f90-b04e-fdc88c4dd434": {

"0": {

"value": "Norfolk"

}

},

"91866e91-70d4-405f-900c-475d0c027399": {

"country": {

"0": "GB"

}

 

I was wanting tó extract the county 'Norfolk' and have tried the following

 

$elements = $row['elements'];

preg_match("@identifier=\"c74a0dba-5307-4f90-b04e-fdc88c4dd434\">\n*\s*<value><!\[CDATA\[([0-9]*)\]\]></value>@" , $elements, $array);

$county=$array[1];

echo "<br>County=" . $county;

 

This does not however extract the content from the identifier c74a0dba-5307-4f90-b04e-fdc88c4dd434

 

Have I missed something??

 

Thanks, Alec

[Christian F.]

I think you'll find that json_decode () will help you accomplish what you want to do, not preg_match ().

[alecthorne]

I used json_decode for the first time to extract data from the list below.

 

{

"metadata.title": "",

"metadata.description": "CAD CAM Software Developer",

"metadata.keywords": "CAD, CAM, Software",

"metadata.robots": " ",

"metadata.author": " ",

"config.enable_comments": "0",

"config.primary_category": "311"

}

 

This worked a treat using the following

 

$catnum = json_decode($params);

$catnum2 = $catnum->{'config.primary_category'};

 

But I am still stuck with the original question

 

"c74a0dba-5307-4f90-b04e-fdc88c4dd434": {

"0": {

"value": "Norfolk"

}

 

As there are additional values after "c74a0dba-5307-4f90-b04e-fdc88c4dd434", how can I extract "Norfolk"?

 

The following obviously did not work

 

$county = json_decode($elements);

$county2 = $county->{'c74a0dba-5307-4f90-b04e-fdc88c4dd434'}; echo $county2;

 

I have looked at the help at php.net, but just cant get my head around this one.

 

Thanks for your patience,

 

Alec

[Christian F.]

Run a var_dump () on the result from json_decode (), and it should become quite apparent. If you're still having issues after that, then I recommend reading upon on Arrays in the PHP Manual. Specifically how multi-dimensional arrays, and how you access their values.

[alecthorne]

Christian,

 

I have looked at multi-dimensional arrays, and thought the following would work.

 

$county = $elements->getElement('c74a0dba-5307-4f90-b04e-fdc88c4dd434')->getElementData()->get('value');

 

All I receive is an internal server error. What have I missed?

 

Thanks, Alec

[PFMaBiSmAd]

Treating the data as an array will be much clearer -

 

$arr = json_decode($elements,true);
echo "<pre>",print_r($arr,true),"</pre>"; // take a look at the data

$key = "c74a0dba-5307-4f90-b04e-fdc88c4dd434";

echo $arr[$key][0]['value'];

[alecthorne]

Thanks for the help.

 

I started looking as treating this as an array, but then was also given the following suggestion. That also worked.

 

$county = json_decode($elements);

$printcounty = $county->{"c74a0dba-5307-4f90-b04e-fdc88c4dd434"}->{"0"}->value;

 

Thank you all for the help, and encouragement to learn php further..

 

Much appreciated... Alec