Question

I have JS file and I need to parse that array in it:

something: ['Prefix.All','Ignore.Me','Prefix.Another']

I need to get all elements from “something” array with defined prefix.
Now I can get it, if array will contain only one element. My regexp:

String: something: ['Prefix.All']
Can get element with:
/something\s*:\s*\[['"](Prefix[a-zA-Z0-9.]+)['"]]/

But how to find many elements in array? And how to find more than one “something” array in file?

Answer 1

In PHP you need to do it in two steps (which is probably better anyway – cramming everything into a single regex isn’t always the best idea).

First, match the array you’re looking for. Note that this regex requires that there are no brackets between the delimiters [ and ], so nested arrays or strings that contain brackets will cause the regex to fail (as in “match the wrong text”):

if (preg_match('/\bsomething: \[([^[\]]*)\]/', $subject, $regs)) {
    $result = $regs[1];
}

This will find the first occurrence of a string like something: ['Prefix.All','Ignore.Me','Prefix.Another'] and put 'Prefix.All','Ignore.Me','Prefix.Another' into $result.

Then you can get all the matches from that:

preg_match_all('/\bPrefix[^\']*/', $result, $final, PREG_PATTERN_ORDER);
$final = $final[0];