Question

I am trying to parse text for special include statements to pull in specific files.

I have the following function:

function parse_includes($text, $directory = 'includes/') {
preg_match_all('/\[include:([^,]+)\]/', $text, $matches);

foreach($matches[1] as $key => $filename) {
    ob_start();
    include($directory.$filename);
    $include = ob_get_contents();
    ob_end_clean();
    $text = str_replace($matches[0][$key], $include, $text);
}

return $text;

}

In passing in this variable:

$text = 'Below is the footer<br><br>[include:sidebar.php] <br><br> [include:footer.php]<br>';

And echo’ing it:

echo parse_includes($text);

I am getting this error:

Warning: include(includes/sidebar.php] <br><br> [include:footer.php) [function.include]: failed to open stream:

If there is only a single [include: *', it works as expected.

How do I need to modify my REGEX? Note how HTML or white space can surround the brackets on either side.

Answer 1

Regular expressions are greedy by default, meaning they try to match as many characters as possible. As it turns out, that ([^,]+) matches this string:

sidebar.php] <br><br> [include:footer.php

You can alter your regular expression to use relucant +:

preg_match_all('/\[include:([^,]+?)\]/', $text, $matches);

This will cause it to match as little as possible, not as much as possible. Alternatively, you can disallow the opening bracket in the matched string:

preg_match_all('/\[include:([^,[]+)\]/', $text, $matches);