Finding text between the same two characters within a php string

Question

So I know how to extract text from a php string when it is cleanly separated by two different characters (ie. [abc])...

However, I am now facing a problematic situation where I need to extract text that is located between two instances of the same character ('/'). What makes it even trickier is that this can happen multiple times within the same string.

An example should help make this clearer:

"This is /a/ silly ex/amp/le of what I /me/an."

In this case, I would want to grab 'a', 'amp' and 'me'.

These examples show the variety of cases I might run into (different lengths and cases where I'm not grabbing a whole word but letters within a word).

What I've tried:

('/(\/.+?)+(\/)/i')

But this, as expected, captures everything between the first and last slashes. The ideal would be a way to match until the NEXT occurrence of a slash, rather than the last one...

I've been googling this for quite some time, but am only coming up with cases with two different delimiters.

Just a tip, you don't have to use / as a separator. When your search pattern includes a /, it can improve readability to use a different character and avoid the escaping: #/.+?/# — miken32
– miken32, Commented Nov 5, 2015 at 3:28
@miken32 Ah yes, good point. I've used this before (for shorter regex'es, ironically) but hadn't thought of using it here. — asg
– asg, Commented Nov 5, 2015 at 13:47

Kevin · Accepted Answer · 2015-11-05 03:20:17Z

1

You can use preg_match_all to get multiple matches.

$string = 'This is /a/ silly ex/ampl/e of what/ I me/an';
$regex = '/\/.+?\//';
preg_match_all($regex, $string, $matches);

print_r($matches);


Array
(
    [0] => Array
    (
        [0] => /a/
        [1] => /ampl/
        [2] => / I me/
    )
)

answered Nov 5, 2015 at 3:20

Kevin

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1 Comment

asg Over a year ago

Thanks, Kevin! This did the trick. I'm accepting your answer.

d0nut · Accepted Answer · 2015-11-05 02:18:15Z

0

Try this:

(\/)(.*?)\1

What is inside of (\/) will be what you're matching between. For example, matching between a set of * would look like this:

(\*)(.*?)\1

Regex101

answered Nov 5, 2015 at 2:18

d0nut

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