Regular Expressions.

[antileon]

Regular expressions are evil..

I want to convert

[test]aabac[test2]aaba[test3]aaba[test4]

to

[test][test2][test3][test4]

by using this code, but it doesn't work as expected.

$text = "[test]aabac[test2]aaba[test3]aaba[test4]";
echo "<pre>";

$text=ereg_replace("\[([^{]])\]([abc])\[([]]*)\]","[\1][\3]",$text);}

echo $text;

it returns:

[test][test2]aaba[test3][test4]

Any ideas how to solve it? Bonus points if you can convert it to a perl expression instead (preg_replace) 🙂

Thanks in advance.

[[deleted]]

It's cheating but it works:

preg_match_all("/[.*?]/",$sString, $aMatches);
echo implode('', $aMatches[0]);

[antileon]

Yes, it works.. But it works a little bit too good 🙂

It should only match a, b or c and not any other letters.. But if you can fix that, I'd be very happy.

[[deleted]]

Nope, you've lost me completely.

What do you want to get exactly?

[antileon]

ok, a few examples should explain what I mean:

[1]aaa[2]bbb[3]ccc[4]ddd[5] => [1][2][3][4]ddd[5]

[abc]abcba[abc] => [abc][abc]

[abc]abcd[abc] => [abc]abcd[abc]

I want to remove all occurences of 'a', 'b' or 'c' when they are between [tags] and if no other letter than 'a', 'b' or 'c' are present.

The code I posted in the original message almost does the job.

Thanks for your help btw.

[kparker]

Surely you can do this more economically by ignoring the parts you want to keep and just replacing all instances of "][a-c]+[" with "][". Or is there a possibility of leading or trailing sequences to get rid of, or embedded []'s that you didn't mention.

[[deleted]]

$sString = '[1]aaa[2]bbb[3]cccd[4]ddd[5]agbcbcbc[8]';

echo preg_replace("/][abc]*?[/", '][', $sString);

[antileon]

Thanks! It works perfectly!