I have the following regex that I have been using successfully:
preg_match_all('/(\d+)\n(\w.*)\n(\d{3}\.\d{3}\.\d{2})\n(\d.*)\n(\d.*)/', $text, $matches)
However I have just found that if the text that the (\w.*) part matches starts with a foreign character such as Ä, then it doesn't match anything.
Can anyone help me with what the correct pattern should be instead of (\w.*) to match a string that starts with any character?
Many thanks
If you do want to match umlauts, then add the regex /u modifier, or use \pL in place of \w. That will allow the regex to match letters outside of the ASCII range.
Reference: http://www.regular-expressions.info/unicode.html
and http://php.net/manual/en/regexp.reference.unicode.php
Ä is a German Umlaut if I am not mistaken. \w Matches (in most flavors) [a-zA-Z0-9_].
You will need to match the unicode range of characters that you want.
\x{00C4} (php) equals the character you want. You will probably need to create a character class to support your unicode characters.
you may have to switch to using unicode chars...
like for ascii you would use [\u0021-\u007e] In this case... the maybe [\u0021-\u007e\u0192-\u687]
I'm not quite sure on what range of characters you want but the \w I think only match things in the normal asci range
Consider using:
/(\d+)\n((\p{L}|\p{N}|_).*)\n(\d{3}\.\d{3}\.\d{2})\n(\d.*)\n(\d.*)/
