[Resolved] Find data between 2 characters in a string??

wscreate

I want to find and display data found between two characters in a string.

Example>

Form sends the following to the .php page....

$data1 = "The Domain Name [somedomain.com] has been renewed";

I want to be able to pull out and display only "somedomain.com".

Example, I want a variable called $domain to only hold the domain name itself, without the brackets or the text.

somedomain.com

I have investigated function strstr().

$data1 = "The Domain [somedomain.com] has been renewed";
$domain = strstr($data1, '[');

OUTPUTS:
[somedomain.com] has been renewed

I can then use substr() to remove the first "[".

$domain = substr("$domain", 1);

OUTPUTS
somedomain.com] has been renewed

But, I am stuck, conceptually, with what to do to trim the end after .com . Note, somedomain.com will change. One run, it could be somedomain.com and the next, it could be "somethingelseentirely.com". Thus, the character length of that part of the string will change each time.

Can someone direct me. At first glance, this seems like it should be so simple, but I cannot seem to conceptualize the solution.

Thanks for any help you can provide.

jerdo

Try this:

$data1 = "The Domain [somedomain.com] has been renewed"; 
$pos1 = strrpos($data1, '[');
$pos2 = strrpos($data1, ']');
$len = $pos2 - $pos1 -1; //subtract 1 to drop the right bracket
$pos = $pos1 + 1; // add 1 to drop the left bracket
$domain = substr($data1, $pos, $len);

Weedpacket

$data1 = "The domain [example.com] has been renewed";
if(!preg_match('/\[(.*?)\]/', $data1, $matches))
{ // Eh? no [domain] in the string?
  $domain = '';
}
else
{
 $domain = $matches[1];
}

Note the backslashes. [] have a particular meaning in regexps, so if you want them to be interpreted as themselves, they need to be escaped.

wscreate

Thanks guys, I will give these ideas a try. I appreciate the help!

wscreate

Both examples work perfectly! Thanks.

acidbox

why cant he just use

$domain = str_replace("[", "", $domain);
$domain = str_replace("]", "", $domain);

seems easy enough to me.

jerdo

He can't use that because then $domain would still contain "The Domain somedomain.com has been renewed" and he wants it to contain somedomain.com