i need help with an Reg. Ex. i have a long text with many whitespaces and new lines, i need to find and select ALL between 2 strings. example:
iojge test rgej <foo>
ferfe 098n34hjlrej
fefe <end
i want to find all between test and end:
rgej <foo>
ferfe 098n34hjlrej
fefe <
how can i do this?
You can try
preg_match("/test(.*?)end/s", $yourString, $matches);
print_r($matches);
m flag will cause $ to match the end of the line and ^ match the start of a line: it will not let the DOT meta character match line breaks. This is done with the s flag.
test and end, which doesn't comply with the OP's sample.
print_r($matches); produces. I like this one better than the look-around suggestion. The readability of this answer is much better.You can use two lookarounds and the /s (single line) modifier, which makes the dot match newlines, to look for everything between your two words:
/(?<=test).*(?=end)/s
To explain:
(?<= # open a positive lookbehind
test # match 'test'
) # close the lookbehind
.* # match as many characters as possible (including newlines because of the \s modifier)
(?= # open a positive lookahead
end # match 'end'
) # close the lookahead
The lookarounds will let you assert that the pattern must be anchored by your two words, but since lookarounds are not capturing, only everything between the words will be returned by preg_match. A lookbehind looks behind the current position to see if the assertion passes; a lookahead looks after the current position.
Since regular expressions are greedy by default, the .* will match as much as it can (so if the ending word appears multiple times, it will match until the last one). If you want to match only until the first time it encounters end, you can make the .* lazy (in other words, it'll match as little as possible that still satisfies the pattern) by changing it to .*? (ie. /(?<=test).*?(?=end)/s).
Alternatively you can also do:
$arr1 = explode("test",$input);
$arr2 = explode("end",$arr1[1]);
$result = $arr2[0];
If you have fixed delimiters, you don’t need regular expressions:
$str = 'iojge test rgej <foo>
ferfe 098n34hjlrej
fefe <end';
$start = 'test';
$end = 'end';
if (($startPos = strpos($str, $start)) !== false && ($endPos = strpos($str, $end, $startPos+=strlen($start))) !== false) {
// match found
$match = substr($str, $startPos, $endPos-$startPos);
}
testandendcan never be a part of the text you're trying to match? What if the string looks like:"test testing ending end"?