PHP regular expression: Get all text from start of string to the ' : ' [duplicate]

This question already has answers here: 开发者_如何学Python Closed 11 years ago.

Possible Duplicates:

PHP Regex to convert text before colon to link

Return the portion of a string before the first occurrence of a character in PHP

I need to get the username from a Twitter RSS feed.

I am returning this data from the feed as the title, and I want to extract the username.

UsernameIwanttoget:This is the Twitter message....

So basically, get all the text before :.

---

$pos = strpos($text, ':');
if ($pos !== false) {
    $username = substr($text, 0, $pos);
    $message  = substr($text, $pos + 1);
}

You don't really need regular expressions here. Regular expressions are slow and not easily understandable if you're not familiar with them, so you'd better go with a string function when you can.

You should use cdhowie's answer instead.

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I'd do this with explode():

$pieces = explode(':', $text, 2);

if (count($pieces) != 2) {
    # Malformed message
}

$username = $pieces[0];
$message = $pieces[1];

If you want the message too, extracting both pieces at once this way is (IMO) a bit more readable than using a regular expression or substr.

If there is optional whitespace padding, you might consider running the result strings through trim().

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explode() would be better. You can then make use of both the username and tweet.

$tweet = explode(":", $text);

$text[0] will give you the username, and $text[1] would give you the tweet.

---

You don't need a regular expression for such a simple task. Just search for the colon and extract the characters up so far:

$str = 'UsernameIwanttoget:This is the twitter message...';
$pos = strpos($str, ':');
if (!$pos)
{
  // Something went wrong: $str doesn't have the expected format!
}
else
{
  $username = substr($str, 0, $pos);
}

---

You could also use the explode() function.

Example:

$stuffIWant = "UsernameIwanttoget:This is the Twitter message....";
$pieces = explode(":", $stuffIWant);
echo $pieces[0]; // piece1

---

Use:

preg_match("/([a-zA-Z0-9\\-]*)(\\s)*:/", $string, $result);

This will get you all alphanumeric characters (and the dash), but it will not match any spaces between the text and the ":"

So $result[1] will have the matched string.

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What yokoloko and Flinsch said is true, but for the answer's sake:

$str = 'UsernameIwanttoget:This is the Twitter message...';
preg_match('/([A-Z0-9]+)[^\s]:/i', $str, $matches);

// If something could be matched, $matches[1] contains the matched part
$username = $matches[1];
//etc...