Help on parsing formatted string

Question

I have strings:

17s 283ms
48s 968ms

The string values are never the same and I want to extract the "second" value from it. In this case, the 17 and the 48.

I'm not very good with regex, so the workaround I did was this:

$str = "17s 283ms";    
$split_str = explode(' ', $str);

foreach($split_str as $val){
    if(strpos($val, 's') !== false) $sec = intval($val);
}

The problem is, the character 's' exists in both split_str[0] and split_str[1], so my $sec variable keeps obtaining 283, instead of 17.

Again, I'm not very good with regex, and I'm pretty sure regex is the way to go in this case. Please assist. Thanks.

Answer 1

You could do this like so:

preg_match('/(?<seconds>\d+)s\s*(?<milliseconds>\d+)ms/', $var, $matches);

print_r($matches);