Posted by Juliette on 06/21/06 18:17

Andy Jeffries wrote:
> On Wed, 21 Jun 2006 08:09:39 +0000, Andy Jeffries wrote:
>> And a bug that actually gives the incorrect output. The first part of the
>> string from your function is:
>>
>> Carson; David, Milne; Rebecca,
>>
>> And it should be:
>>
>> Carson, David; Milne, Rebecca;
>
> And it also has the same deficiency as Rik's function version in that it
> adds an extra delimiter on the end.
>
> Cheers,
>
>
> Andy
>


Andy,

Oops.. I obviously posted too quickly (and yes, I didn't test the code
before posting, just did it off-hand).

Interesting to see the ensuing discussion this has brought. I normally
use preg myself, but just couldn't think of how to do this one. In that
respect I still have a nice challenge (regex) I'm working on myself
which I can't seem to get right.

Just in case someone is interested, you can find the corrected code from
my function below. I've also gotten rid of some of the 'fluff' which I
only put in to make the code easier to understand.
About the extra delimiter: that was not explicite in the requirements
given by the OP, so that's why I didn't take that into account. The
below function does however deal with that correctly, i.e. the way you
suggested it ought to work.

$array = explode ( ', ', $string );
$arraycount = ( count($array)-1 );
$string = '';

for( $i=0; $i<=$arraycount; $i++ ) {
$string .= ( $i === $arraycount ) ? ( $array[$i] ) : ( (1&$i) ? (
$array[$i] . '; ' ) : ( $array[$i] . ', ' ) );
}
unset( $array, $arraycount );

The regex will still win, but I would guess this is slightly faster than
my earlier function.

Grz, Juliette

[Back to original message]