PCRE Help please...

[bostonmacosx]

I'm going to parse a config file.

The file is laid out like.

#begin config username
suff inside.
#end config username

#begin config username2
suff inside.
#end config username2

What I want to do is only alter the stuff inside for a particular container of text and not through each users configuration. Could somone please explain how to do this.

Thanks
Robert

[bradgrafelman]

$pattern = '@(#begin config username\s)(.*?)(\s#end config username)@si';
$replacement = '$1new stuff inside.$3';

$data = file_get_contents('config.txt');
$data = preg_replace($pattern, $replacement, $data);

Of course, if you wanted this to be more generic, you could adapt this into a function with arguments:

function update_config($source, $username, $data) {
	$pattern = "@(#begin config $username\\s)(.*?)(\\s#end config $username)@si";
	$replacement = "$1$data$3";

return preg_replace($pattern, $replacement, $source);
}

Where $source is the original config file data.

[NogDog]

If it's not too late to modify your config file format a bit, you might want to take a look at the parse_ini_file() function.