use regex or php function to get all characters before ":" (colon)

I have many fields that are like this pattern:

    re2man: (johnny bravo)
re1man: (john smith)......

user: (firstname lastname)..

I wanted to use regex, or another php function to get only characters before the colon (开发者_运维问答":")

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Look at explode() to simply split the string at the ':'.

For instance, list($username) = explode(':', $string);

(list() is being used to assign just the first part of the exploded string to $username and discard the rest; a longer way to do it would be:

$parts = explode(':', $string);
$username = $parts[0];

Also, you could use the extra limit parameter to indicate that you don't need the rest of the parts, like:

list($username) = explode(':', $string, 1);

That may or may not be faster. Also, I would expect using explode() to be more efficient than some of the other regex-based solutions offered.

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Regex style:

preg_match('/([^:]*):/', $subject, $matches);

Plain string searching:

strstr($subject, ':', true);

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Use print preg_replace('/^([^:]+)(:.*)$/', "$1", $string);

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How about this:

$matches = array();
preg_match('/([\w\d]+):\s+\(([\w\d\s]*\))/', $line, $matches);

$username = $matches[1];
$realname = $matches[2];

Of course, you should loop around this, and also check the return value of the preg_match() call to see if the line matched your expectations.