[RESOLVED] PHP & Regular Expressions

steveryan

Hi all

I suspect the answer to this is simple but for whatever reason I cannot figure it out.

I have to use brackets in a regular expression to show a bit of text is optional (i.e. it may or may not be there), but the problem with this is preg_match_all is interpreting the brackets as "write the content to the matches array".

Simple example:

$pattern = 'I want to save this "([^"])" to the matches array, but I don't want to save this optional text (may not be here)? to the matches array";
preg_match_all("/".$pattern."/U", $haystack, $matches);

So as you can see, I want the ([^"]) text to be saved, but the (may not be here)? pattern is just part of the regular expression, and I don't want it put in the array.

How can I do this?

Any help appreciated.

Thanks

m_tt

So, you want to save what is in the quotes but not was is in parentheses?

m_tt

Your example is confusing so I'm not sure what you are going for.

$subject = "I want to save \"this text in quotes\" and \"this text in quotes too\" but (this text in parentheses)";
preg_match_all("/(\"[^\"]+\")/", $subject, $matches);

Weedpacket

The fact that plain parentheses fulfill two functions is not always helpful. There are often times when a grouping subpattern is required without a capturing requirement. If an opening parenthesis is followed by "?:", the subpattern does not do any capturing, and is not counted when computing the number of any subsequent capturing subpatterns. For example, if the string "the white queen" is matched against the pattern the ((?:red|white) (king|queen)) the captured substrings are "white queen" and "queen", and are numbered 1 and 2. The maximum number of captured substrings is 99, and the maximum number of all subpatterns, both capturing and non-capturing, is 200.

http://www.php.net/manual/en/regexp.reference.subpatterns.php

steveryan

Weedpacket;11001021 wrote:
http://www.php.net/manual/en/regexp.reference.subpatterns.php

That's it exactly!

Thank you.