PHP get text between a string and another

Question

So I have a lot of text in a text file that acts like a "database" and I need to extract a specific part that starts from a string and ends with another one.

To be more specific, some of the "database" looks like this:

i:24;s:5:"sName";s:12:"adsfasdffdfd";s:7:"iStatus";i:1;s:9:"iPosition";i:0;s:17:"sDescriptionShort";s:29:"<p>test short description</p>";s:16:"sDescriptionFull";s:28:"<p>test full description</p>";

And I need to extract the part between  and  having as parameter the first i:24, the number being the parameter.
I tried using regexp but no success until now.
Now I know it's not good practice asking for code itself but this time I'm really stuck! Any ideas?
P.S. The file contains strings like this one after another. So I need the regexp to find a i:$a with $a my number and return the content from the first paragraph it encounters.

So what I expect to be returned is: test short description Considering this should be the first paragraph encountered AFTER i:24

Then there must be something wrong with the CMS. This seems like it should be a serialized string. Try to fix the real cause of this instead of implementing a new one with a unnecessary regex. — Rizier123
– Rizier123, Commented Jun 27, 2016 at 19:34

wpcarro · Accepted Answer · 2016-06-28 14:21:13Z

1

So you're looking for text that comes after the literals i:24? Since none of these are special characters, let's begin our pattern construction with that literal sequence...

i:24

Next there may or may not be more characters to consume between the i:24 and the opening  tag. Let's assume that these characters can be anything, so we'll use a wildcard metacharacter with the {,INF} quantifier, * giving us...

i:24.*

We want to tame the regex engine's appetite so let's modify our quantifier by making it non-greedy.

i:24.*?

Next we want to match AND CAPTURE an opening, ...

i:24.*?(<p>)

...and the content inside of the  tag, which we'll assume can be anything (read wildcard) and maybe nothing, {,INF}, or *.

i:24.*?(<p>.*)

Remember to tame our * quantifier's appetite so that it doesn't consume too many  tags.

i:24.*?(<p>.*?)

And finally we'll close it off by consuming and capturing the closing  tag, with the escaped forward-slash, since it's a special character.

i:24.*?(<p>.*?<\/p>)

Hope this works for what you're trying to accomplish.

edited Jun 28, 2016 at 14:21

answered Jun 27, 2016 at 21:33

wpcarro

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1 Comment

Vlad Eugen Nitu Over a year ago

Thank you very much! Your explanation is very clean and easy to understand. Great content :)

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