Quickly Extracting Specific Parts of a String in PHP

In the current project I am working on, there are certain characters within a string that identify a part that get decoded before they enter the database. In this partial of the string, it used to contain a dash DDA-7.5 like so. They are both identifiers that represent different things. I can explode this out the split the string by the dash to get one part of the string for the model name at the beginning and the capacity number at the end. Done!

However, requirements changed and now the structure is required to be in this format, DDA60. What do we do now? str_split to the rescue!

Lets Do This!

Here’s how we can grab the model name at the front part of the text.

function parseModel($modelKey) {
	$modelArr = str_split($modelKey);
	$model = array_slice($modelArray, 0, 3);


    return implode($model);
}

Sweet! We can split the string into an array with str_split. Then, we can slice the first three characters with array_slice.

What about the last characters though? We can update the function to account for this.

function parseModelInfo($modelKey, $type) {
	$modelArr = str_split($modelKey);

	if ( $type == 'capacity' ) {
		$cap = array_slice($modelArray, 3);
		 return implode($cap);
	}

	$model = array_slice($modelArray, 0, 3);


    return implode($model);
}

The last parts after the 2nd index represent the “capacity.” We add in a parameter to check for this. If so, we array_slice from the 3rd index onward. Not if the third parameter is null, it will grab the rest of the values unless specified. Easy enough!

A Note on Implode

See how we didn’t specify a delimiter in the implode returns? That is because that parameter is defaulted to an empty string. You can check out the docs here!