Question

I have a string and need to get a specific chunk of text out of it. That chunk is always going to be wrapped in a known quantity of of other text, so its easy to use a regular expression to find the desired chunk via its surroundings. In php, what is the best way to do this? I’ve read through the man pages of various functions that deal with regular expressions, but almost all of them seem to return the number of matches, but not the match itself.

My goal is to get the results of the match, then use preg_replace to get rid of the known quantity and leave me with the desired text.

Answer 1

if (!preg_match('/foo (expression) bar/', $text, $matches)) {
    // text didn't match!
}

echo $matches[1];

You pass an extra variable as the third parameter to preg_match, here $matches. $matches[0] will contain the whole regex match, matches[1] the first () group, $matches[2] the second () group etc.