Regex Expression for strings which look like javascript objects in PHP

Question

We have strings in php like the following two examples:

{{'LANGUAGE_ID','String inclusive special chars (,/)'}}
{{'LANGUAGE_ID','String inclusive special chars (,/)','Another string inclusive special chars (,/)'}}

The strings are always surrounded by {{ and }}. Inside we have multiple elements separated by a comma and surrounded by single quotes. The first element is always a word \w. After that we have a unknown number of elements which can be a word or sentence including special characters. What we want to get is the content (text between single quotes) for each element.

We have a solution as long as we know how many elements the string contains.

Solution for 1. example: {{'([\w]+)','([^\n\r']+)'}}

Solution for 2. example: {{'([\w]+)','([^\n\r']+)','([^\n\r']+)'}}

We are looking for a solution which works for both examples or even a example with three or more elements.

We have a regex share to play around here: http://regexr.com/3c58c

anubhava · Accepted Answer · 2015-11-06 18:19:37Z

2

You can use this regex using \G:

preg_match_all('/(?:{{|\G,)'([^']+)'(?=.*?}})/', $text, $matches);

print_r($matches);

RegEx Demo

edited Nov 6, 2015 at 18:19

answered Nov 6, 2015 at 18:07

anubhava

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4 Comments

Mikel Bitson Over a year ago

\R matches a capital R. I don't think it's necessary. Works with just (?:{{|\G,)'([^\']+)'(?=.*?}}) - Perhaps he was attempting to do a return? \r?

anubhava Over a year ago

Mike is right, \R is not even needed here. See updated answer. btw \R matches any newline character but it shouldn't be used in [...]

Andreas Daoutis Over a year ago

it does work. Thanks. But to be honest I don't understand the \G, would you be so kind and give me a short explanation?

anubhava Over a year ago

\G assert position at the end of the previous match or the start of the string for the first match. So in our example it matches position after {{ then after '([^']+)' match it matches comma after that match and it keeps on matching that until it gets }}

Pablo Digiani · Accepted Answer · 2015-11-06 18:14:26Z

0

How about this one:

{{'([\w]+)',('([^\n\r']+)',*)*}}

answered Nov 6, 2015 at 18:14

Pablo Digiani

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3 Comments

Andreas Daoutis Over a year ago

I just copied and pasted it into my regexr link and it doesn't look correct

Pablo Digiani Over a year ago

With this expression, both lines in regexr are highlighted

Rohit Gupta Over a year ago

This has been flagged as low quality. Please edit your answer and explain each of the steps in it.

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