I have a string like this:
$string = 'startTHISISTHESTRINGINEEDend'
I need the string between start and the end obviously. I tried regex but its way hard for a newbie like me so no succes on that side. The length of end part is changing so substr function is no go. Tried to combine strpos with strstring but no success on that too. How can I achieve that?
Try this; will provide a detailed explanation so the whole concept of the regex is simplified doesn’t seem like magic:
$string = "startTHISISTHESTRINGINEEDend";
preg_match("/^start([a-z0-9]+)end$/is", $string, $matches, null, 0);
echo '<pre>';
print_r($matches);
echo '</pre>';
The regex is fairly simple. And here is the explanation.
start at the beginning of the string; that is what the ^ means.( and ) basically mean you are capturing what are in between the parentheses.( and ) is regex logic to capture only alphanumeric characters as represented by [a-z0-9]+.end at the end of the string; that is what the $ means.is at the end of the the regex basically means make sure the match is case insensitive via the i (aka: PCRE_CASELESS) and then the s indicates a PCRE_DOTALL which as explained in the PHP manual on pattern modifiers:If this modifier is set, a dot metacharacter in the pattern matches all characters, including newlines. Without it, newlines are excluded. This modifier is equivalent to Perl's /s modifier. A negative class such as [^a] always matches a newline character, independent of the setting of this modifier.
If you wish to include non alpha numeric characters you can just use this (.*?) instead of ([a-z0-9]+). But unclear from your request since you are only showing alphabet characters. Or if you wanted to capture specific non-alphanumeric characters like %, / & ^ then just do this: ([a-z0-9%\/^]+). Note how the / is set as \/. Adding the \ escapes the / which makes preg_match realize that it needs to explicitly match / & not interpret that as part of the regex logic.
And the output of $matches would be:
Array
(
[0] => startTHISISTHESTRINGINEEDend
[1] => THISISTHESTRINGINEED
)
So just access it by referring to $matches[1].
echo $matches[1];
Output would be:
THISISTHESTRINGINEED
[a-z0-9]+ does for this poster's sake?
$string = str_replace("start","", $string);
$string = str_replace("end","", $string);
echo $string;
Not a wise solution but probably sufficient one
If your start and end occurs somewhere in a string (only once) and you don't want to use regular expressions, you can use the following solution:
$string = 'HIstartTHISISTHESTRINGINEEDendANDOTHERSTUFFHERE';
$start = strpos($string, 'start') + strlen('start');
$end = strrpos($string, 'end');
$result = substr($string, $start, $end-$start);
var_dump($result);
$string = 'xwerwstartTHISISTHESTRINGINEEDasdwerendwerq';
$start = 'start';
$stop = 'end';
echo substr($string,
strlen($start) + strpos($string, $start),
strpos($string, $stop) - (strpos($string, $start) + strlen($start))
);
