[RESOLVED] Help with matching syntax

[shawjames]

I have a textarea passed to a variable, and I need help getting a piece of text out of it.

I have a special note in the textarea, and I have put it in like this: [note]this is the special note[/note]

I want to get that note out of the textarea, can this be done with preg_match and if so, what syntax code would do the trick?

Also, I can change the format of that note tag, from [note][/note] to something else if it is easier.

[bradgrafelman]

Looks like you're using BBCode-style syntax, so one option may be to use the [man]BBcode[/man] PECL extension. However, that might be a little overkill if this is the only instance of such syntax you care about.

If that's true, then regular expression pattern matching might indeed be your best bet. One possible pattern might be:

@\[note\](.*?)\[/note\]@si

[shawjames]

Great! Thank you, I was able to do it with this code. I just used str_replace to get rid of the note tags:

$textnote = "aladng;jadkl;jagd kljd90g0a7sdgjlag [note]this is the note we need![/note]ohwjkysd 9s7dg hdgh\n\n ";
preg_match("@\[note\](.*?)\[/note\]@si",$textnote, $match);
$note = $match[0];
$note = str_replace("[note]","",$note);
$note = str_replace("[/note]","",$note);
print "<hr>$note<hr>";

[bradgrafelman]

There's no need for str_replace() at all - just use $match[1] instead.

[shawjames]

Excellent, thank you!