Parse string into its 3 parts: name, age, city

Question

I want to parse a line of text into three distinct parts (name, age, and city).

Example 1:

Muhammad Sholehhudin 24 Old Malang

Expected Result:

Name: Muhammad Sholehhudin
Age: 24 Old
City: Malang

The name and city substrings may contain one or more words.

Example 2:

Muhammad Sholehhudin Fauzi 51 Old Malang Kota

Expected Result:

Name: Muhammad Sholehhudin Fauzi
Age: 51 Old
City: Malang Kota

Answer 1

You can use preg_split() to split up text based on a pattern.

The regex is split up into a few sections divided by the '|' witch means or.
1. (^([A-z]+\s){2,3})
- the '^' means from the beginning of the string.
- [A-z]+ = any letter from A-z the '+' means 1 or more times.
- '{2,3}' = that pattern 2 or three times.
2. \d{1,3} Old = any digit 1 to 3 times followed by 'Old'.
3. (\w+\s?){1,2}$
- '\w+' any word character one or more times.
- '\s?' an optional space.
- '$' means the end of the line

$input = $_POST['input_name'];

$pattern = '/((^([A-z]+ ){2,3})|(\d{1,3} Old)|(\w+\s?){1,2}$)/';

$matches = preg_split($pattern, $input, -1, PREG_SPLIT_DELIM_CAPTURE);

$name = $matches[1];
$age = $matches[5];
$city = $matches[10];

echo 'Name: ' . $name;
echo ' Age: ' . $age;
echo ' City: ' . $city;