Find a string and create a variable with regex

Question

I grab the source code of a website with file_get_contents(). Inside this code, i try to detect this king string and put the content of idDM in a variable.

'idDM':'x1mi7f7'

For example, here, $idDM will be equal to x1mi7f7, but the string can be :

'idDM':'xxxxxxx'

And the variable will be xxxxxxx.

I know o have to use REGEX for that. For now, I just manage to find if there is IdDM, but not to recover its contents.

Any advice ? Thanks.

If the file you get has a Json-like format, it is probably easier to use json-decode (after little modification if needed). — Casimir et Hippolyte
– Casimir et Hippolyte, Commented Apr 7, 2014 at 13:51

Amal · Accepted Answer · 2014-04-07 13:50:09Z

3

Use the following regex:

'idDM'\s*:\s*'([^']+)'

Explanation:

'idDM' - match the literal string 'idDM' (with the quotes)
\s* - match one or more whitespace character
: - match a literal colon character
\s* - match one or more whitespace character
'([^']+)' - match (and capture) everything that's inside single-quotes

Usage:

$str = "foo bar 'idDM':'x1mi7f7' more baz";

if (preg_match("/'idDM'\s*:\s*'([^']+)'/", $str, $matches)) {
    $idDM = $matches[1];
}

var_dump($idDM); // => string(7) "x1mi7f7"

Demo

answered Apr 7, 2014 at 13:50

Amal

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3 Comments

Damien Over a year ago

Thanks fo your answer and the explanation. It's really perfect !

Amal Over a year ago

@artmees: That's not really needed in this case as the variable will get initialized inside the if block if a match is found. Plus, the idDM part seems to be constant, so I don't see the reason to use variable-variables here.

a14m Over a year ago

@AmalMurali thanks i thought he needed to add it to a variable :D mybad

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