Regular Expressions in php

sofa-m

Hi there,
I'm kind of new, so now sure where to post this...
I need some way of parsing out what's in between quotes in a string.
For example, I have the following info as value in one string:

"This is a seminar on quantum physics," hosted by Prof. Smith, School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology.

I need to somehow manipulate this string to extract what's between the double quotes. I tried various regular expressions with preg_match(), couldn't get anything to work...

thoughts?
thanks,
Sofia

NogDog

If there will only be one quoted portion of the string, you could use something like:

preg_match('/(?<=").*(?=")/', $string, $matches);
echo $matches[0];

If you don't want any punctuation at the closing quote, perhaps this:

preg_match('/(?<=").*(?=\W*")/', $string, $matches);
echo $matches[0];

sofa-m

NogDog wrote:
If there will only be one quoted portion of the string, you could use something like:
preg_match('/(?<=").*(?=")/', $string, $matches);
echo $matches[0];

yes, there will only be one quoted portion...
however, i just tried your code and it's not working for me...

actually, i just realized that i need to extract the other portion of it as well, here's exactly what I need to do:

I have strings, like this one

"A Unified Framework for Indexing and Retrieval of Multimedia Documents Based on High-Dimension Feature Extraction and Discriminative Classifier Learning," by Prof. Chin-Hui Lee, School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology.

and when I print it out to the screen, I need to bold the stuff inside the quotes.
In every string, there will be only one quoted portion, and it will be followed by some other text

NogDog

If you want to remove the quotes and make their contents bold:

$string = '"This is a test," by NogDog';
echo preg_replace('/"(.*)"/', '<strong>\\1</strong>', $string);

sofa-m

NogDog wrote:

echo preg_replace('/"(.*)"/', '<strong>\\1</strong>', $string);

thanks - this worked!
one more q' - if i dont' want to remove the quotes, i just want to bold the contents with the quotes

also, if i want to change the <strong> to some other tag, I just change that, the \1 stays, right?

Salkcin

Just move the subclass chars ( and ) so your matching pattern goes inside the class

ex:
echo preg_replace('/(".*")/', '<strong>\1</strong>', $string);

Yes, you can change the <strong> tags to other tags.