Evaluating arithmetic expressions in configuration files

An interesting question came up in a consultants session this evening - how to take an expression that's held in a configuration file such as (A3+C3)*(A5+E6) and have the program work out the expression in the "conventional" programming sense - i.e. BODMAS (Brackets, O???? Division, Multiplication, Addition, Subtraction).

Now - I learnt how to do this at University and I even did it way back in CGL days when I wrote a complete geometric language - the algotithm is known as a Dijkstra Shunt - but I was blowed if I wanted to try to rewrite it this evening. My visitor had a Visual Basic solution which involves him using a .dll file from Office, but his customers weren't happy having to install office as a pre-requisite to running his software. It was wanted on a web site, so how to do it in PHP?

When you think about it, all the languages we use these days already have the Dijkstra shunt built into them .... we just need to make use of it. In the case of PHP, it's available via the eval function and that's what we ended up using:

a) Take the expression and use a regular expression to extract each of the variables in turn
b) Substitute the variable with the value that it contains (that's a database lookup in my example, since C3 means the third column, 3rd row of a table
c) Use the eval function to do the sum.

Total - a few hundred bytes of code ... (see here) ... and a visitor who left feeling that in an hour I had given him the mechanism to take a complete step and an expensive piece of software out of his system.
(written 2006-05-10, updated 2006-06-05)

Associated topics are indexed under

H107 - String Handling in PHP
  [4072] Splitting the difference with PHP - (2013-04-27)
  [4071] Setting up strings in PHP - (2013-04-27)
  [3790] Solution looking for a problem? Lookahead and Lookbehind - (2012-06-30)
  [3789] More than just matching with a regular expression in PHP - (2012-06-30)
  [3788] Getting more than a yes / no answer from a regular expression pattern match - (2012-06-30)
  [3534] Learning to program in PHP - Regular Expression and Associative Array examples - (2011-12-01)
  [3516] Regular Expression modifiers in PHP - summary table - (2011-11-12)
  [3515] PHP - moving from ereg to preg for regular expressions - (2011-11-11)
  [3424] Divide 10000 by 17. Do you get 588.235294117647, 588.24 or 588? - Ruby and PHP - (2011-09-08)
  [3020] Handling (expanding) tabs in PHP - (2010-10-29)
  [2629] Curly braces within double quoted strings in PHP - (2010-02-09)
  [2238] Handling nasty characters - Perl, PHP, Python, Tcl, Lua - (2009-06-14)
  [2165] Making Regular Expressions easy to read and maintain - (2009-05-10)
  [2046] Finding variations on a surname - (2009-02-17)
  [1799] Regular Expressions in PHP - (2008-09-16)
  [1613] Regular expression for 6 digits OR 25 digits - (2008-04-16)
  [1603] Do not SHOUT and do not whisper - (2008-04-06)
  [1533] Short and sweet and sticky - PHP form input - (2008-02-06)
  [1372] A taster PHP expression ... - (2007-09-30)
  [1336] Ignore case in Regular Expression - (2007-09-08)
  [1195] Regular Express Primer - (2007-05-20)
  [1058] PHP Regular expression to extrtact link and text - (2007-01-31)
  [1008] Date conversion - PHP - (2006-12-26)
  [728] Looking ahead and behind in a Regular Expression - (2006-05-22)
  [642] How similar are two words - (2006-03-11)
  [608] Don't expose your regular expressions - (2006-02-15)
  [589] Robust PHP user inputs - (2006-02-03)
  [574] PHP - dividing a string up into pieces - (2006-01-23)
  [560] The fencepost problem - (2006-01-10)
  [558] Converting between acres and hectares - (2006-01-08)
  [493] Running a Perl script within a PHP page - (2005-11-12)
  [463] Splitting the difference - (2005-10-13)
  [422] PHP Magic Quotes - (2005-08-22)
  [337] the array returned by preg_match_all - (2005-06-06)
  [54] PHP and natural sorting - (2004-09-19)
  [31] Here documents - (2004-08-28)

47a3

Back to
First way to get rid of customers

Previous and next
or
Horse's mouth home

Forward to
A customer service company

Some other Articles

Planning a hotel refurb - an example of a Gant chart in PHP
Gardens, Well House Consultants HQ
Protecting images from theft
A customer service company
Evaluating arithmetic expressions in configuration files
First way to get rid of customers
Room for Octopuses
Pictures from my travels
Why reinvent the wheel
THE home directory or MY home directory

4088 posts, page by page

Link to page ... 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 82 at 50 posts per page

This is a page archived from The Horse's Mouth at http://www.wellho.net/horse/ - the diary and writings of Graham Ellis. Every attempt was made to provide current information at the time the page was written, but things do move forward in our business - new software releases, price changes, new techniques. Please check back via our main site for current courses, prices, versions, etc - any mention of a price in "The Horse's Mouth" cannot be taken as an offer to supply at that price.

Link to Ezine home page (for reading).
Link to Blogging home page (to add comments).

You can Add a comment or ranking to this page

Public Training Courses

Running regularly at our UK training Centre.
[Schedule] - [About] - [Book]

Like this? ??