RegEx to grab text within tags

devinemke

let's say i have a string like this:

$string = 'This string has <i>two</i> places with <i>italics</i> tags';

what i want to do is get an array that includes only the text within the italic tags:

Array
(
    [0] => two
    [1] => italics
)

there are longwinded ways to do this with explode() strpos() and substr() but what would be the best way using RegEx?

Weedpacket

Use preg_split to explode on both opening and closing tags simultaneously.

yelvington

preg_match_all() also should do what you want.

devinemke

Use preg_split to explode on both opening and closing tags simultaneously.

can you please give me an example?

devinemke

still can't quite figure out how to do this using regex, so i for the moment i'm doing it the long way:

$string = 'This string has [two] places with [brackets] in it';

$split = preg_split ('//', $string);
foreach ($split as $key => $value)
{
	if ($value == '[') {$open[] = $key;}
	if ($value == ']') {$close[] = $key;}
}

foreach ($open as $key => $value)
{
	$diff = ($close[$key] - $value) - 1;
	$brackets[] = substr ($string, $value, $diff);
}

print_r ($brackets);

...which works if you are searching for a single character

yelvington

<?
header('Content-type: text/plain');
$string = 'This string has two places with italics tags';
$regex = '/([^<]*)<\/i>/';
preg_match_all($regex, $string, $matches, PREG_PATTERN_ORDER);
print_r($matches);
?>

The result is not exactly what you wanted, because $matches is an array of arrays. $matches[1] is what you want.

print_r($matches) yields:

Array
(
[0] => Array
(
[0] => two
[1] => italics
)

[1] => Array
    (
        [0] => two
        [1] => italics
    )

)

print_r($matches[1]) yields what you wanted,

Array
(
[0] => two
[1] => italics
)

The key in the regex is the parenthesized subexpression ([^<]*), which says "match any number of any characters other than a left angle bracket." The overall match is considered expression 0, and the parenthesized match is expression 1.

devinemke

thanks to all for the help. i took yelvington's idea and made a few changes. basically what i am doing is storing strings in a database and i will be putting my own delimiters (brackets in this case) around certain words in the string that i will need to extract out as a separate array.

$string = 'This string has [two] places with [brackets] tags';
preg_match_all ('/\[([^\[]*)\]/', $string, $matches, PREG_PATTERN_ORDER);
print_r ($matches);