Question

I can’t seem to find a function that captures and returns a regex’ed string.

$string = "hello123!";
$string = regexfunction($string, "/([0-9]*)/");
echo $string;

Prints

123

Answer 1

You want to use preg_match for this, although the syntax will be slightly different:

$string = "hello123!";
preg_match("/[0-9]+/", $string, $matches);
print $matches[0]; // 123