Question

i have a simple php example of using preg_match_all

$str = " 
Line 1: This is a string 
Line 2: [img] image_path [/img] Should not be [img] image_path2 [/img] included. 
Line 3: End of test [img] image_path3 [/img] string."; 

preg_match_all("~\[img](.+)\[/img]~i", $str, $m); 

var_dump($m);

and i would like it to return

array(
    [0] =>image_path
    [1] =>image_path2
    [2] =>image_path3
)

for some reason i don’t get this result.

ant ideas?

Answer 1

Change it to this:

preg_match_all("~\[img](.+?)\[/img]~i", $str, $m); 

var_dump($m[1]);

The reason you need the ? is to make it “non-greedy”. With your code, it matches from the first opening tag to the last closing tag. The + and * operators are greedy by default, consuming as many characters as possible. The ? modifier stops this behaviour.

You need to dump $m[1]instead of $m since preg_match* also matches the entire matched string, not just marked captures.

Live example: http://ideone.com/vXk9W