PHP Regex Get Text Between BBCode Tags

Question

I need help with the PHP code for the following:

Get the text between each occurrence the BBCode tags [code] and [/code] in a given string so I can then replace the spaces ' ' with the nbsp character.

Long story short, I can't use CSS or DOM to do this, I need to do this on the server.

#[code](.*?)[/code]# seems to only work if there are no breaks (or newlines) between the starting and ending tags.... :(

Martin. · Accepted Answer · 2012-03-10 10:23:29Z

4

I think you're searching for something like this

<?php
preg_match_all("/\[code\](.*?)\[\/code\]/ism", $search, $match);

hover, I'd suggest you to use BBcode parsers instead

To replace all spaces with  , simply use preg_replace_callback

<?php
$text = preg_replace_callback("/\[code\](.*?)\[\/code\]/ism", function($match) {
     return str_replace(" ", "&nbsp;", $match[1]);
}, $search);

edited Mar 10, 2012 at 10:23

answered Mar 9, 2012 at 20:41

Martin.

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5 Comments

jasonbar Over a year ago

This is too greedy. Needs to use (.*?) so that you get each instance of the code block.

Max Magee Over a year ago

This worked! However, how do I replace the spaces ' ' in everything it matched with &nbsp and return the whole modified string at the end? Thanks!

Max Magee Over a year ago

@Martin. How do I change this so that I can replace the spaces with &nbsp. Your pattern gives me an array of strings that contain the text between the code tags, but how do I then replace the spaces there and then return ALL of the original string with the now modified spaces?

Max Magee Over a year ago

Nevermind, I got it through a series of str_replace calls. Crappy programming that I'm not really proud of, but it'll work. Thanks for your help @Martin and jasonbar.

Martin. Over a year ago

@Max sorry I haven't answered your question about spaces, I had some bad day and forgot how I've done it before. Callback! Here it is, I've edited my answer, so you can use less crappy code :)

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