Posted by brendan on 09/07/05 14:34

my regular expression knowledge is admittedly amateurish ... I have spent an
hour trying to get this to work without any great success, but am in the
middle of a big project so I can't waste a day fiddling around to get it to
work (although I might have to if someone here can't help).

I thought I would throw it out to the group to see if anyone could solve the
problem quick and easy.

I need to break a search string into components to search against a
database.
We want to allow the user to specify database columns by using

[column name][colon][search text]

i.e.
"author:Jane Smith institution:university of Cambridge year:1976"

so basically we have to split the string at the beginning of any word that
ends in a colon.
I need then get an array with column_name=>column_value to construct a SQL
query from.

At the moment I'm just getting garbage or parse errors ... Can anyone help?
Accolades for anyone that can. A pint of lager for anyone in Cambridge that
can!
cheers
Brendan.

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