current community

your communities

more stack exchange communities

company blog
Stack Exchange Inbox Reputation and Badges
tour help
Sign up ×
Stack Overflow is a community of 4.7 million programmers, just like you, helping each other. Join them; it only takes a minute:
up vote 0 down vote favorite

Ok, since I never really got an hang on regex in PHP, it would be awesome if someone could link to a understandable article...

In this case i want to find a value in a string.

if example

$string = "blah blah blha lorem ipsum [get_this_value=10] more lorem ipsum";

i would like a function that returns "10". it would be loverly if it was stored in array and that the function can retrieve many of them if there's multiple of these i want them in an array.

$string = "blah blah blha lorem ipsum [get_this_value=10] more lorem ipsum [get_this_value=9] etc etc";

would return array(10, 9) and so on...

share|improve this question
    
Best source for RegEx online is http://www.regexbuddy.com/regex.html If you can afford it ($30) RegExBuddy is worth every penny and will pay for itself in productivity in a very short period of time. – Toby Allen Nov 11 '12 at 23:23
    
I'm in the same boat as you with regex but I'm getting better thanks to starting to watch this series: blog.themeforest.net/screencasts/… You wanted an article, these are videos but they start from the very basics and work up. – Rick Calder Nov 11 '12 at 23:23
    
Thanks! :) I will check it out! – gubbfett Nov 11 '12 at 23:29
up vote 2 down vote accepted

First you should learn about regular expressions. I can highly recommend this tutorial.

Then you can read up on some PHP specific regex issues in PHP's documentation.

But to get you started, this would solve your problem:

preg_match_all("/\[[^\]=]*=(\d+)\]/", $string, $matches);

Now $matches[1] will be your desired array. Note that this does not depend on the specific string get_this_value.

For the purpose of you actually teaching yourself some regular expressions through the linked pages, I will not explain this regex in detail, but instead just tell you the concepts I have used. Unescaped square brackets [...] mark a character class. In this case (due to the ^) a negated one. \d is a built-in character class. + is a repetition quantifier. And parentheses (...) mark a capturing group.

share|improve this answer
up vote 1 down vote 
<?php
$string = "blah blah blha lorem ipsum [get_this_value=10] more lorem [get_this_value=13] ipsum";

preg_match_all("~\[get_this_value=(\d+)\]~i", $string, $matches);
print_r($matches);
/*

Array
(
    [0] => Array
        (
            [0] => [get_this_value=10]
            [1] => [get_this_value=13]
        )

    [1] => Array
        (
            [0] => 10
            [1] => 13
        )

)
*/
share|improve this answer
    
Why did you escape the =? – alex Nov 11 '12 at 23:27
    
It doesn't hurt ;). But thanks for pointing it out, I removed it. – David Müller Nov 11 '12 at 23:28

Your Answer

 
discard

By posting your answer, you agree to the privacy policy and terms of service.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged or ask your own question.