regular expression 4

[disord3r]

I'm sure this has been asked before (actually, I think I've SEEN it here before), but my keyword searching appears to be a bit off today.

I'm looking for a regular expression that will match data between certain characters (a pair of # and a pair of %, to be exact). I have this file being fed to me, and there's a lot of junk in there that I don't need to deal with. Randomly throughout this document, there is %something% and #something_else#, and that's what I'm interested in.

I'm not too good with regular expressions, but what I was hoping to do was parse through the feed (twice, if necessary) and end up with an array of % matches, and an array of # matches (there may be multiple matches of each in this file).

I'm off to look get help elsewhere on the web, but if anyone is quicker at typing than I am at reading, the help would be greatly appreciated.


Thanks!

 

[skiflyer]

Here's an example which illustrates...

$string = "la #de# a duh";
$pattern = "/#(.*)#/";
preg_match($pattern, $string, $matches);

print($matches[1]);

http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.preg-match.php

for more reading... including how to properly handle things like
la #de# da #doo!#

 

[disord3r]

That worked somewhat, but $matches[2] (or any index greater than 1) is empty. It's driving me nuts.

There are 4 instances of #something# in the feed file, so $matches should have 5 elements, correct?

 

[DRJ478]

All you need to do is use preg_match_all instead of preg_match.

More detail in the documentation:

http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.preg-match-all.php

 

[disord3r]

Let me clarify my previous post a little bit.

$matches[0] contains everything I would expect it to, but count($matches) returns 1. This throws off a loop that I'm using.

Any idea why it comes back with a 1? According to PHP docs, that means that count() thinks it's not an array.

DRJ - I'll try your suggestion.


Thanks for the help folks!

 

[sleipnir214]

Maybe the array only has one element?

Want the best answers? Ask the best questions:

http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html

TANSTAAFL!

 

[disord3r]

pre_reg_match_all has me in the right direction.

Thanks all!

 

[disord3r]

Make that preg_match_all (it's been a LONG day).