Question

I have a text like that

[CONTENT][SECTION]This is the section C #1[/SECTION][SECTION]This is the section C #2[/SECTION][SECTION]This is the section E #3[/SECTION]

and I try to match each section, including the section tags with that expression :

\[SECTION\][^SECTION]+(SECTION\])

but the above code does not work because the [^SECTION] is looking in the text between the start and end tags for any character that is not S, E, C, T, I ,O and N

Any idea on how to solve that issue ?

I am using PHP to match the tags and it’s contents with preg_match_all(); And I like to match each section one by one, and not all the sections at once.

Answer 1

\[SECTION\](.*?)\[/SECTION\]

I think this is what you want, getting the text for the contents of a single SECTION?

The ? makes the * lazy, so it will only match up to the first [/SECTION] from the current one.

---

Example:

$input = "[CONTENT][SECTION]This is the section C #1[/SECTION][SECTION]This is the section C #2[/SECTION][SECTION]This is the section E #3[/SECTION]";
var_dump(preg_match_all("(\[SECTION\](.*?)\[/SECTION\])",$input,$m),$m);

Result:

int(3)
array(2) {
    [0]=>array(3) {
        [0]=>string(43) "[SECTION]This is the section C #1[/SECTION]"
        [1]=>string(43) "[SECTION]This is the section C #2[/SECTION]"
        [2]=>string(43) "[SECTION]This is the section E #3[/SECTION]"
    }
    [1]=>array(3) {
        [0]=> string(24) "This is the section C #1"
        [1]=> string(24) "This is the section C #2"
        [2]=> string(24) "This is the section E #3"
    }
}