Split a single string by several seperator

Question

Hi,
I have a string from where i want to get the values for my parameters by splitting the string by the seperator -i, -u, -p.
string:
-ic:\reports\inc\ -ucuriosity -psecret
I want to have those values to be assigned to the variables for further use, like:
$i = c:\reports\inc\
$u = curiosity
$p = secret
the split MUST has to be done using the delimiter -i, -u, -p

Answer 1

Those are regular expressions.  In english, that would translate to "Immediately following either the beginning of the string or a whitespace character, the characters -u followed by one or more non-whitespace characters."
Breaking it down a bit further:
(?<=EXPRESSION):  A zero-width positive lookbehind assertion (I know, it's a mouthful).  Basically, it says that whatever follows must come at a position where the EXPRESSION was matched (but the EXPRESSION itself is not part of the match.)
Now that I look at what I wrote, that wasn't strictly necessary in this case.  This expression would have worked fine:  '(?:\s|^)-u(\S+)', or even just '(\s|^)-u(\S+)', except in the second case, you'd need to retrieve the value of $matches[2]
instead of $matches[1].  More on that later.
\s|^ :  A compound regular expression that can match either a single whitespace character (\s), or the position at the beginning of the string (^).  This was to ensure that we didn't match the characters "-u" if they happened to occur in the middle
of a word somewhere.  The | character is regex's version of the "-or" operator.
-u:  Matches the literal characters "-u"; no special meaning in regex at this point.
(\S+):  Matches one or more non-whitespace characters, and saves them in a capturing group.  \S matches any non-whitespace character, and the + symbol is a quantifier that means "one or more".  The parentheses around that part of the expression
form a capturing group.  In this case, the group is not named, so they're added to the $matches table by number, in order from left to right.
$matches[0] always contains the entire match.  $matches[1] will be the value from the first capturing group, and so on.