Question

I have a text that has the possible values already in the text, i want to show the right values in situations. I’m not really good with regexes and i don’t really know how to explain my problem so here is an example. I’ve got it working almost:

$string = "This [was a|is the] test!";

preg_replace('/\[(.*)\|(.*)\]/', '$1', $string);
// results in "This was a text!"

preg_replace('/\[(.*)\|(.*)\]/', '$2', $string);
// results in "This is the test!"

This works without problems but when there are two parts it doesn’t work anymore because it gets the end bracket from the last.

$string = "This [was a|is the] so this is [bullshit|filler] text";

preg_replace('/\[(.*)\|(.*)\]/', '$1', $string);
//results in "This was a|is the] test so this is [bullshit text"

preg_replace('/\[(.*)\|(.*)\]/', '$2', $string);
//results in "This filler text"

Situation 1 should be the values between ( and | and situation 2 should show the values between | and ).

Answer 1

Your probem is the regex greediness. Add a ? after .* to make it consume only the string within the square brackets:

 preg_replace('/\[(.*?)\|(.*?)\]/', '$1', $string);

Likewise could you use the /U ungreedy modifier. Better yet use a more specific match in place of .*? anything.