[Resolved] Regular expression multiple strings finding

wilku

Hello.
I'm trying to make more-less universal function that would look for multiple ocurrences of strings in between any two specified strings. This is what I've done so far:

[edit]I tried to insert code here with php tag, but the parser does something funny with slashes and backslashes, wich are quite important in this example, so I moved the code to quote instead of php.[/edit]

<?php
$input1 = '<tr><td>test1
</td><td>test2</td>';
$input2 = 'ala ma kota ?.\$^a kot ma ale?.\$^';

$result1 = FindTextBetween('<td>','</td>',$input1);
for ($i=0; $i<count($result1);$i++)
echo "Result1 > $i > ".$result1[$i]."<br>";

$result2 = FindTextBetween('?.\$^','?.\$^',$input2);
for ($i=0; $i<count($result2);$i++)
echo "Result2 > $i > ".$result2[$i]."<br>";

function FindTextBetween($start_phrase,$end_phrase,$input)
{
$srch = array("$","^{",".","","?","(",")","[","]","\","|");}
$rep = array("\$","\^","\.","\","\?","$","$","\[","\]","\\","\|");
$start_phrase = str_replace($srch,$rep,$start_phrase);
$end_phrase = str_replace($srch,$rep,$end_phrase);

$regex = "|$start_phrase(.*)$end_phrase|Us";
echo htmlspecialchars($regex)."<br>";
preg_match_all($regex,$input,$matches);
if (is_array($matches[1]))
return $matches[1];
else return array();
}
?>

The output for the script above is as follows:

|<td>(.)</td>|Us
Result1 > 0 > test1
Result1 > 1 > test2
|\?\.\\[\]\\$\^{(.)\?\.\\[\]\\$\^|Us}

As you can see it works for simple strings, but has a problem with special reg-ex characters. I'm trying to escape them inside the function, but, obviously, I'm doing something wrong. Any ideas?

mrhappiness

maybe [man]preg_quote[/man] is of help?

wilku

Thanks!

So the final and working function looks like:

function FindTextBetween($start_phrase,$end_phrase,$input)
{
$start_phrase = preg_quote($start_phrase,"/");
$end_phrase = preg_quote($end_phrase,"/");
$regex = "/$start_phrase(.*)$end_phrase/Us";
preg_match_all($regex,$input,$matches);
if (is_array($matches[1]))
return $matches[1];
else return array();
}