Question

I have a regexp pattern:

<^(([a-z]+)\:([0-9]+)\/?.*)$>

How do I avoid capturing the primary group?

<^(?:([a-z]+)\:([0-9]+)\/?.*)$>

The above pattern will still put the whole string ‘localhost:8080’ into the first (0) group. But I need to get only 2 matched groups, so that first (0) group is populated with ‘localhost’ and second (1) with ‘8080’.

Where did I make a mistake?

Answer 1

from the docs:

matches

If matches is provided, then it is filled with the results of search. $matches[0] will contain the text that matched the full pattern, $matches[1] will have the text that matched the first captured parenthesized subpattern, and so on.

if you don’t care about the full match, you can use array_shift() to remove the unwanted element.

array_shift($matches);