Question

I have custom tags [tag val=100][/tag]. How do I get val and whatever goes between the tags?

ex:

[tag val=100]apple[/tag]  

value1 = 100
value2 = apple

edit: what if I had multiple items inside the tag
ex:

[tag val=100 id=3]

Answer 1

If you have a string like that in your question, you can use preg_match instead of preg_match_all:

$str = "[tag val=100]apple[/tag]";

preg_match("/\[.+? val=(.+?)\](.+?)\[\/.+?\]/", $str, $matches);

$value = $matches[1];    // "100"
$content = $matches[2];  // "apple"

Update: I see you might have multiple attributes in each element. In that case, this should work:

// captures all attributes in one group, and the value in another group
preg_match("/\[.+?((?:\s+.+?=.+?)+)\](.+?)\[\/.+?\]/", $str, $matches);

$attributes = $matches[1];
$content = $matches[2];

// split attributes into multiple "key=value" pairs
$param_pairs = preg_split("/\s+/", $attributes, -1, PREG_SPLIT_NO_EMPTY);
// create dictionary of attributes
$params = array();
foreach ($param_pairs as $pair) {
    $key_value = explode("=", $pair);
    $params[$key_value[0]] = $key_value[1];
}