Email read in PHP

Question

I need to read fields from this email

MOVE INFORMATION

Pickup Address: 34 Marigold Ln, Marlboro, NJ 07746

Delivery Address: 180 Prospect Park W, Apt 5, Brooklyn, NY 11215

Primary service dates:
Pack Date: N/A
Move Date: 6/6/2013

Other service dates:
Pack Date 2: N/A
Move Date2: N/A
Other Date: N/A

The process I am following is:

Connect through IMAP
get the nessage body

Now I want to read specified data and need to convert it into array like:

array( ' Pickup Address'=>'34 Marigold Ln, Marlboro, NJ 07746', 
       'Delivery Address'=>'180 Prospect Park W, Apt 5, Brooklyn, NY 11215'...)

I have tried preg_match('/(?P<Pickup Address>\w+): (?P<Delivery Address>\d+)/', $body, $matches)

but thats having some problem:

It is not accepting space in 'Pickup Address'
it is providing array in Array ( [0] => Address: 34 [PickupAddress] => Address [1] => Address [DeliveryAddress] => 34 [2] => 34 ) format.

Basically I need to save these fields in database and I can not use attachment here. Let me know if you have any other solution or any way to make it work

Order and format will be same every time? means first Pickup address then delivery address and so on? — Irfan DANISH, Jun 25 '13 at 12:19
Yes!The fields name would remain same their values would vary — Jacklish, Jun 25 '13 at 12:21

score 5 · Accepted Answer · answered Jun 25 '13 at 12:21

5

Something like this ?

$string = 'MOVE INFORMATION

Pickup Address: 34 Marigold Ln, Marlboro, NJ 07746

Delivery Address: 180 Prospect Park W, Apt 5, Brooklyn, NY 11215

Primary service dates:
Pack Date: N/A
Move Date: 6/6/2013

Other service dates:
Pack Date 2: N/A
Move Date2: N/A
Other Date: N/A';

preg_match_all('#(.*?):(.*)#m', $string, $m);
if(isset($m[1], $m[2])){
    $array = array_combine($m[1], $m[2]);
    print_r($array);
}

Output:

Array
(
    [Pickup Address] =>  34 Marigold Ln, Marlboro, NJ 07746
    [Delivery Address] =>  180 Prospect Park W, Apt 5, Brooklyn, NY 11215
    [Primary service dates] => 
    [Pack Date] =>  N/A
    [Move Date] =>  6/6/2013
    [Other service dates] => 
    [Pack Date 2] =>  N/A
    [Move Date2] =>  N/A
    [Other Date] =>  N/A
)

answered Jun 25 '13 at 12:21

HamZa

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What if right values also has ":" character, will this handle it? – Irfan DANISH Jun 25 '13 at 12:24
Like Pickup Address: 34 Marigold Ln, Marlboro:NJ 07746 – Irfan DANISH Jun 25 '13 at 12:24
It has issue, if right values have new line characters, it reads only first line. – Irfan DANISH Jun 25 '13 at 12:28
1

@IrfanDANISH Yes, ofcourse. Otherwise how would you differentiate between left and right or if it's a valid string you want to enter ? – HamZa Jun 25 '13 at 12:30

score 2 · Answer 2 · edited May 23 '17 at 12:21

You seem to have chosen a solution then are having difficulty making it fit the problem. Yes you could use regexes - but you're going to have to define the problem a lot better than you already have. What if a line contains more than one ':'? What about blank lines? What if a data item spans more than one line (which it might do depending on how the email is encoded)?

While you could use a YAML parser, it's probably overkill for a simple layout:

$data=array();
while ($line=fgets($file_handle)) {
     $key=trim(substr($line, 0, strpos($line, ':')));
     $value=trim(substr($line, strpos($line, ':')+1));
     if ($key && $value) $data[$key]=$value; 
}

I like this, people tend to think that regex is the solution to everything. — HamZa, Jun 25 '13 at 13:15

score 0 · Answer 3 · answered Jun 25 '13 at 12:25

You can use code like this:

preg_match_all("/(Pickup Address|Delivery Address): *(.*)/", $email, $match);
$result = array();
foreach($match[1] as $i => $key) {
    $result[$key] = $match[2][$i];
}
print_r($result);

if you want more fields just add them to the regex.

Email read in PHP

3 Answers3

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