[RESOLVED] regex

mark_kccs

Hi all

I have a large amount of text in a db that contains many occurances of placeholders in the form of [various text] and i need to get all of these into an array but I have never been able to get my head around regex despite many attempts, so I am on bended knee asking for a little code snippet in the form of a regular expresion if anyone would be so kind.

Many thanks

nrg_alpha

It would be nice to see what those placeholders look like.. perhaps a sample chunk of text and what you are trying to isolate.

Something tells me it may be wiser to use explode(), at least initially to get things put into an array, and then go from there (be it using preg or using other non-regex functionality). But obviously, without knowing the details, I may be wrong.

But you do need to be more specific.. give a sample block of text, and what you are looking for in that block of text.

mark_kccs

Thanks for the reply

"your [Her eye colour] eyes and [Her hair colour] hair. Don't give me any more reason than I need"

this is a short example and I would like to get every occurance of [Her eye colour] and [Her hair colour] into an array.

Many thanks

nrg_alpha

So just to be clear, are you looking for literally the text '[Her eye colour]', or actual colours (brown, blue, etc..)?

mark_kccs

Basically there may be many of these place holders and I need to make this dynamic as I do not always know what is in between the brackets. In laymans terms I have the text from the db in a variable and i need to search this variable for a square bracket, the contents after the bracket and the closing square bracket, so it would be a wildcard approach for the test between the brackets. If the searched item already exists in the array it will continue so I should end up with an array of all the searched for items unique in the array such as..

$array[0]=[some text]
$array[1]=[other text]
$array[2]=[more text]
$array[3]=[text text]

Many thanks

nrg_alpha

OK.. if I understand it all correctly, is this an example of what you are looking for?

$str = 'your [Her eye colour] eyes and [Her hair colour] hair. Don\'t give me any more reason than I need.
This is another line with [her lipstick] and her [perfume] as an additional test in multiline macthing.';
preg_match_all('#(\[.+?\])#', $str, $matches);
echo '<pre>';
print_r($matches[0]);
echo '</pre>';

Outputs:

Array
(
    [0] => [Her eye colour]
    [1] => [Her hair colour]
    [2] => [her lipstick]
    [3] => [perfume]
)

mark_kccs

Brilliant, many thanks that was exactly what I needed.

Cheers

nrg_alpha

No problem. Come to think of it though.. this new pattern is actually more efficient than the original:

preg_match_all('#(\[[^]]+\])#', $str, $matches);

So you should use this one instead. My bad..