Re: Capturing part of regex search

On Sun, Aug 23, 2015 at 6:30 PM, Ian Evans <dheianevans@gmail.com> wrote: > I've been looking at the regex functions. Either it's a lack of caffeine or > it's right in front of my nose, but how do I put part of a regex find into > a variable? Plus I suck at regex. > > e.g. > > I'm interested in capturing the names of people who are found in text > surrounded by the following format: > > "John Doe":/cr/johndoe/ or "Jane Smith":/cr/janesmith/ > > I'd want to place John Doe or Jane Smith into the variable. The search will > always be for "name":/cr/nameurl/ > > What regex and php function would I use? Thanks for any pointers. One of > these days I'll master regex. > If the names will always contain double quotes, it should be as easy as: $var = ' "John Doe":/cr/johndoe/ or "Jane Smith":/cr/janesmith/'; preg_match_all('/".*"/U', $var, $res); print_r($res); U to make it ungreedy (its greedy by default). If there are other quotes in the text, you can add the colon to the expression as well.