ZEND PHP 5 Certification STUDY GUIDE

Strings And Patterns ” 89
Parsing Formatted Input
The sscanf() family of functions works in a similar way to printf(), except that, instead
of formatting output, it allows you to parse formatted input. For example, consider
the following:
$data = ’123 456 789’;
$format = ’%d %d %d’;
var_dump (sscanf ($data, $format));
When this code is executed, the function interprets its input according to the rules
specified in the format string and returns an array that contains the parsed data:
array(3) {
[0]=>
int(123)
[1]=>
int(456)
[2]=>
int(789)
}
Note that the data must match the format passed to sscanf() exactly—or the function
will fail to retrieve all the values. For this reason, sscanf() is normally only useful
in those situations in which input follows a well-defined format (that is, it is not provided
by the user!).
Perl-compatible Regular Expressions
Perl Compatible Regular Expressions (normally abbreviated as “PCRE”) offer a very
powerful string-matching and replacement mechanism that far surpasses anything
we have examined so far.
Regular expressions are often thought of as very complex—and they can be at
times. However, properly used they are relatively simple to understand and fairly
easy to use. Given their complexity, of course, they are also much more computationally
intensive than the simple search-and-replace functions we examined ear-
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