Question

I have a document with the following format:

<scheme attr1="lorem" attr2="ipsum" global-test="text goes here" global-attr2="second text goes here">
</scheme>

I want to use a regular expression to extract all the attributes that match global-(.*).
It can also only match on the “scheme” element, so using a simple regular expression like (global-([^=]*)="([^"]*)")+ is not an option. I tried the following regular expression:

<scheme.*([\s]+global-([^=]*)="([^"]*)")+

But this will only match on “global-attr2”, and will see the other global attributes as part of the .* selector. Making the * selector on .* lazy also doesn’t seem to help.

And I know that getting data from an XML document with regular expressions isn’t a good practice, but this script is for a preprocessor. It modifies the XML before parsing it.

Answer 1

A preg_match_all will match everything and store everything as well. So first match against “<scheme”, and if it matches, then run preg_match_all Match against something like

/global-(.*?)=(\w+)/

and then extract from matches[0], matches[1], etc.