Get the position of first capital letter in a string using php

Question

I am having array in which different letter in each word is capital like:

aPple, Orange, baNana, mANgo, Papaya

I want to get the position of the first letter that is capital. And order them accordingly. That is the word that has first letter capital will be first, and then with second letter capital will be second etc... Like

Orange
Papaya
aAple
mAngo
baNana

If two words come with capital letter in same position for example in above list Orange and Pappaya comes with first letter as capital, then they have to be sorted in alphabetic order.

Is this very hard to achieve in php?

Answer 1

You could use strcspn()

Find length of initial segment not matching mask

For example:

echo strcspn('aAple', 'ABCDEFGHJIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ');
// prints '1' - the string starts with 1 character not in upper case

Full Code

echo "<pre>" ;
$array = array("aPple", "Orange", "baNana", "mANgo", "Papaya");
foreach($array as $value)
{
    echo $value , "= " , strcspn($value, 'ABCDEFGHJIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ') . PHP_EOL;
}

Output

aPple= 1
Orange= 0
baNana= 2
mANgo= 1
Papaya= 0

You use that function to do your (reverse) sort.

Answer 2

preg_match("/^.*?[A-Z]/", 'aAple', $arr);

$str_position = (strlen($arr[0]) - 1);

There are so many ways you can do this on. Use the one you find most logical. :)

This one simply returns the first part of the string to the first Capital letter. Then I calculate string length and subtract by 1.

Answer 3

If you use PHP > 5.3 you can use this:

$test = array("aPple", "Orange", "baNana", "mANgo", "Papaya");

echo implode(', ', array_map(function($value){
    $matches = array();
    preg_match('/[A-Z]/', $value, $matches, PREG_OFFSET_CAPTURE);
    return $matches[0][1];
}, $test));

Otherwise you have to create another function as replacement for the lambda function.

Output: 1, 0, 2, 1, 0

Answer 4

If you want a non-fancy way to do it , here is my suggestion :

** for gettings caps position *

 function getCapsPosn($str)
 {
  $i = 0;
  $CapsPosn = -1;
  for ($i =0 ; $i < strlen($str) ; $i++)
  {
    if (( ord($str[$i]) >= 65 ) && ( ord($str[$i]) <= 90))
    {
        //echo ord($str[$i]);
        $CapsPosn = $i;
        return $CapsPosn;
    }
  }
 }

Use an associative array to store the Caps posn in the array .e.g. array['aPple'] = '1' and so on. then use php sort functions to sort it. PHP sorting functions can be found at : http://php.net/manual/en/array.sorting.php