Getting the value of wildcard matches in an string (regex?)

[holloway]

Hi, I only end up coming here once every 2 years so I guess I'm getting better* at php 😉

I have a string from the URL that looks like "2004/January/14" and a pattern of "20/y/" (the means any character that's not a slash).

Seeing whether that string matches the pattern is simple enough -- just turn the pattern into a regular expression by replacing the stars with "[^/]*" and then use preg_match().

The problem is that I'd like to somehow get an array where the wildcards matched the url. Eg, with that previous example I want to be able to make an array of [0] = '04', [1] = 'Januar', [2] = '14'.

I've tried using preg_match_all() and this function does return all matches, but it returns "2004/January/14" because that's the match, and there doesn't seem to be a way of getting the individual wildcards.

I've been racking my brain about this all afternoon. Any ideas?

Should I just parse the string character by character myself?

*slacker

[swr]

Originally posted by holloway
I have a string from the URL that looks like "2004/January/14" and a pattern of "20/y/" (the means any character that's not a slash).

Place the parts you want in brackets and they'll be extracted. Like so:

$yourstring = "2004/January/14";
preg_match('|(20[^/]*?)/([^/]*)/([^/]*)|', $yourstring, $matches);
echo "Year: {$matches[1]}<br>";
echo "Month: {$matches[2]}<br>";
echo "Day: {$matches[3]}<br>";

[holloway]

That works perfectly, thanks!

(I really wasn't looking forward to parsing that string by hand -- this works fine)