Question

split string on uppercase letters

Asked by: flow79

Hello all!

I am working with a database that was built before my time at our company.  Most of the compound field names in the tables do not separate words with special characters, they simply use uppercase to distinguish it.  For example, I would want to see Delivery_Date, but we currently have DeliveryDate.  For data display, it would be great to be able to split this string into two separate parts (Delivery Date).  Obviously I can do this using the split function, but I can't figure out how to split on every uppercase letter.  

I hope I have explained this well enough.

TIA.

- Dan

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Asked On
2007-01-10 at 10:54:45ID22118024
Tags

split

,

string

,

uppercase

Topic

PHP Scripting Language

Participating Experts
2
Points
50
Comments
5

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Answers

 

by: VoteyDisciplePosted on 2007-01-10 at 10:57:24ID: 18286461

How about...

$name = preg_replace('/([a-z])([A-Z])/', '$1 $2', $name);

 

by: flow79Posted on 2007-01-10 at 15:10:04ID: 18288542

Votey,

Not a bad solution, but I am more looking for a method using the split function.  is this possible in any way?

ex: split(uppercase, $string) - is there something to put as the pattern which finds uppercases?

 

by: VoteyDisciplePosted on 2007-01-10 at 15:20:28ID: 18288661

Not quite, 'cause the delimiter generally tends to get taken out.  You can get close with...

preg_split('/([A-Z])/', 'ReportGroup', -1, PREG_SPLIT_DELIM_CAPTURE);

... but that will give the 'R' and 'G' as elements of their own (i.e. [0] and [2] ), so you'd have to do some work to slap them back in front of the 'eport' and 'roup' (in [1] and [3]).

How about...
explode('_', preg_replace('/([a-z])([A-Z])/', '$1_$2', 'ReportGroup'));

?

That would "fail" if there were a _ in the name anyway, but really I'm betting you'd want that to get split out just the same?

 

by: mensuckPosted on 2007-01-10 at 17:02:05ID: 18289445

This allows for any type of character before the upper case character, expect the two conditions explained below. So it allows numbers too!

<?php

$old = '#(?<!^| )([A-Z])#';

$new = ' \\1';

echo preg_replace ( $old, $new, $string );

?>

1. dont (match) the start of the string, if it has a uppper case letter
2. don't (match) a upper case letter if a (space) comes before it.

So you end up with adding a space to only the words you want to split!

ms!

 

by: flow79Posted on 2007-01-16 at 12:32:48ID: 18327227

Sorry for the delay in the response - crazy week.  

Votey, the explode('_', preg_replace('/([a-z])([A-Z])/', '$1_$2', 'ReportGroup')); worked perfectly.  It splits properly whether there is an _ or simply caps.

You rock!

20120131-EE-VQP-002

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