php regex find string patterns

Question

Hello I'm not good with regex and I would really appreciate if someone could help me out. I need a regex function that will find all patterns that start with : and are followed by at least 1 letter and maybe numbers until next occurrence of a symbol.

For example :hi/:Username@asdfasfasdf:asfs,asdfasfasfs:asdf424/asdfas

As you can see here there are 4 occurences. What I would like to achieve is to end up with an array containing:

['hi','Username','asfs','asdf424']

PS. Letters might be in other languages than english.

Downvoting for no reason... congrats

This is what I'm using so far but I suppose it would be easier with regex

public function decodeRequest() {

    $req_parts = $this->getRequestParams(); // <-array of strings


    $params = array();

    for ($i=0; $i < count($req_parts); $i++) {

        $starts = mb_substr($req_parts[$i], 0, 1, 'utf-8');
        $remains = mb_substr($req_parts[$i], 0, mb_strlen($req_parts[$i]), 'utf-8');

        if ($req_parts[$i] == ':') {
            array_push($params,$remains);
        }


    }

    return $params;

}

Answer 1

Since you want support for non-ASCII characters it is better to use \p{L} with u switch:

$s = ':hi45/:Username@asdfasfasdf:asfsŚAAÓ,asdfasfasfs:asdf424/asdfas';
if (preg_match_all('/:([\p{L}\d]+)/u', $s, $arr))
   var_dump($arr[1]);

OUTPUT:

array(4) {
  [0]=>
  string(4) "hi45"
  [1]=>
  string(8) "Username"
  [2]=>
  string(10) "asfsŚAAÓ"
  [3]=>
  string(7) "asdf424"
}

Answer 2

/:([a-zA-Z][a-zA-Z0-9]*)/

• you need at least a letter [a-zA-Z]
• then any sequence of valid characters (letters, numbers) [a-zA-Z0-9]*

See demo

<?php
    $string = ":hi/:Username@asdfasfasdf:asfs,asdfasfasfs:asdf424/asdfas";
    preg_match_all('/:([a-zA-Z][a-zA-Z0-9]*)/', $string, $matches);
    print_r($matches[1]);

Output:

Array
(
    [0] => hi
    [1] => Username
    [2] => asfs
    [3] => asdf424
)