Question

I have strings of data in a field named content, one record may look something like:

loads of text ... [attr1] some text [attr2] more text [attr3] more text etc...

What I’m looking to do is get all the text within the square brackets; so that I can put it into a PHP array. Is this even possible with mySql?

I’ve seen the following post: Looking to extract data between parentheses in a string via MYSQL, but they are looking to only extract one value from between their parentheses, I have an unknown number of them. After reading that post I’ve though of doing something like the following;

SELECT substr(content,instr(content,"["), instr(content,"]")) as attrList from myTable

Which would grab me the following:

[attr1] some text [attr2] some more text [attr3]

and I can use PHP to strip the rest of the text out and then explode the string into an array, but is there a better way to do this just using mySql where I can retrieve something like:

[attr1][attr2][attr3]

I was thinking perhaps regex, but I see that just returns a true of false which doesn’t help me a lot.

Answer 1

After even more research, I’m not sure it’s possible in mySql, and I might need the results in string or array form depending on where I’m using them in my app.

So I’ve created a new method to return the list after I’ve got the data from the database (with a little help from this post: PHP: Capturing text between square brackets):

public function attrList($array=false)
{
    preg_match_all("/\[.*?\]/",$this->content,$matches);

    $params = str_replace(array('[',']'),'',$matches[0]);

    return ($array===false) ? implode(', ',$params) : $params;
}