Question

I have this little code to capture text between brackets:

$string = '[title=my title] http://bit.ly/gANFxi [maps:some cool place]';    
preg_match_all('/\[([^\]]*)\]/', $string, $matches);
print_($matches[0]);

What I get is the following:

    Array(
      [0] => [title=my title]
      [1] => [maps:some cool place]
    )

I want to make more restrictive to avoid “[some-not cool]” or “[another+stuff]”,
so I need to catch only [some:thing] and [some=thing].

How can I do it?

Answer 1

This will catch everything that contains a ‘=’ or ‘:’ and ignore others:

$string = '[title=my title] http://bit.ly/gANFxi [maps:some cool place] [some-not cool] or [another+stuff]';
preg_match_all('/\\[([^\\]]*[\\=|\\:][^\\]]*)\\]/', $string, $matches);
print_r($matches[0]);

Does this do the trick? Or are there further requirements? That is, this return “[some stuff=some:thing]” but should it? (note both the multiple words and both ‘=’ and ‘:’).