Regex matching multiple lines multiple times

Question

I have a string like this:

Name: John Doe

Age: 23

Primary Language: English

Description: This is a multiline
description field that I want 
to capture

Country: Canada

That's not the actual data, but you can see what I'm trying to do. I want to use regex to get an array of the "key" fields (Name, Age, Primary Language, Description, Country) and their values.

I'm using PHP.

My current attempt is this, but it doesn't work:

preg_match( '/^(.*?\:) (.*?)(\n.*?\:)/ism', $text, $matches );

There is a \n but your modifiers say that every newline is a new string. And the . also matches \n — Sindhara
– Sindhara, Commented May 11, 2012 at 13:48
I assume the data is populated by a user. Is the data coming from a $_POST or out of a database? — Biotox
– Biotox, Commented May 11, 2012 at 20:37

Andrew Cheong · Accepted Answer · 2012-05-11 19:47:04Z

1

Here's one solution: http://rubular.com/r/uDgXcIvhac.

    \s*([^:]+?)\s*:\s*(.*(?:\s*(?!.*:).*)*)\s*

Note that I've used a negative lookahead assertion, (?!.*:). This is the only way you can check that the next line doesn't look like a new field, and at the same time continue where you left off. (This is why lookaheads and lookbehinds are known as zero-width assertions.)

EDIT: Removed bit about arbitrary-width lookaheads; I was mistaken. The above solution is fine.

edited May 11, 2012 at 19:47

answered May 11, 2012 at 15:29

Andrew Cheong

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livtasos · Accepted Answer · 2012-05-11 13:46:48Z

0

Would PHP's strtok help you? You could use it with ":" as the delimeter/token and trim leading and trailing spaces to remove the unwanted new lines.

http://php.net/manual/en/function.strtok.php

answered May 11, 2012 at 13:46

livtasos

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