Wanted: Service Anyone good with Regular Expressions?

[Mr.Domains]

Anyone good with Regular Expressions, that can spare me 30 seconds of their time? Basically, I have bible reference strings that look like this:

Matthew 7:7-8
Proverbs 23:7
Ephesians 5:25
etc...

I want to split them into Book, and Reference, like:
$book="Matthew", $ref="7:7-8"
$book="Proverbs", $ref="23:7"
$book="Ephesians", $ref="5:25"

The closest I've got is:
$ref = ereg_replace("(.*)([0-9]*:[0-9]*)","\\2",$string);
$book = str_replace("$ref","",$string);

But for some reason, this seems to return:
$book="Matthew 7", $ref=":7-8"

... what am I doing wrong!?!
Thanks,

Neil

 

[Spinlock]

You might try the following:

$ref = ereg_replace("(.*[[:space:]])([0-9]*:[0-9]*)","\\2",$string);

That should fix your problem. You can clean the space off the book by replacing

$book = str_replace("$ref","",$string);

with

$book = str_replace("[[:space:]]$ref","",$string);

 

[Brujah]

you might want preg_match
www.php.net/preg_match

Matthew 7:7-8
something like this maybe..
preg_match( '/(\w+) (\d{1,2}:\d{1,2}?\-\d{1,2})/', $input, $match )
$match[1] = book
$match[2] = chapter reference

I didn't test it but I'm thinking something like that. Someone will clean it up

 

[Mr.Domains]

Thanks Spinlock, your fix worked fine! And Brujah, I didn't get to try yours, but thanks anyway, I appresiate you efforts! Cheers, guys.