strip arguments with regular expressions

saltwater

I am trying to get al the arguments of a tag into an array with regular expressions, I want a result like this:

$arg[0] would return 'this="an argument"'
$arg[1] would return 'boe="ba"'
$arg[2] would return 'lol="hihi"'

I am trying the following code:

<?
$string='<a this="an argument" boe="ba" lol="hihi">';
$search='[a-zA-Z][=]["][^"]["]';
$arg=split($search,$string);
for ($i=0;$i<count($arg);$i++) {
echo htmlspecialchars($arg[$i])." ";
}
?>

But I get this a result:

<a >

anyone?
Thanks in advance,
Bruno

[deleted]

your regular expression will match on zero or more letters, followed by an '=' sign, followed by a quote, followed by zero or more non-quotes, followed by a quote.

Then you proceed to SPLIT around this pattern.
That means you get everything that is INBETWEEN the patterns....

saltwater

oops, my mistake 🙂
Is there a function witch does what I want or will I just have to make a regular expression that works inverse?

Thanks already,
Bruno

saltwater

I am trying to build the regular expression so that I can use split but I'm not so succesfull 🙂, could you help me?

Thanks,
Bruno

[deleted]

There is no function to do what you want.

(but it is time that someone made one!)

[deleted]

What makes you think you need to split on a regexp in the first place? ;-)

$string='<a this="an argument" boe="ba" lol="hihi">';

all the arguments are seperated by spaces,
and the key/values are seperated by an '=' sign, and all values are enclosed by quotes....

in short:
$sString='<a this="an argument" boe="ba" lol="hihi">';
preg_match_all("/([a-zA-Z]+)=\"([a-zA-Z ]+)\"/", $sString, $aParts);
echo '<pre>';
print_r($aParts);

saltwater

Thanks!!!
that is just what I needed!
but, could you explain what you just did? because I don't quite understand the reg ex.

/([a-zA-Z]+)=\"([a-zA-Z ]+)\"/

what purpose have the / ?

Vriendelijk bedankt 😉
Bruno

[deleted]

the outser slashes are pattern delimiters, they define where the pattern begins and ends. It seems redundant here because there are already quotes around the entire pattern, but these are PERL compatible regexps, and in PERL they can get WAY more complex than this.

here goes:
/([a-zA-Z]+)=\"([a-zA-Z ]+)\"/

[a-zA-Z]+ match one or more letters
([a-zA-Z]+) make it so that whatever is matched is recognized as one block
= match on an '=' sign
\" match on a quote
[a-zA-Z ]+ match on one or more letters or spaces
\" match on a quote

Or, match on any number of letters, followed by an '=' sign followed by a quote, followed by any number of letters and/or spaces, followed by a quote, and make the letters in fron of the '=' sign and between the quotes into recognizable blocks.

The blocks are what you see reported in the second and third elements of the $aParts array. The first is filled with what matched on the entire pattern.

saltwater

okay, I think I understand 😉
Thanks!!