Question

I have this text string:

$text="::tower_unit::7::/tower_unit::<br/>::tower_unit::8::/tower_unit::<br/>::tower_unit::9::/tower_unit::";

Now I want to get the value of 7,8, and 9
how to do that in preg_match_all ?

I’ve tried this:

$pattern="/::tower_unit::(.*)::\/tower_unit::/i";
preg_match($pattern,$text,$matches);

print_r($matches);

but it still all wrong…

Answer 1

You forgot to escape the slash in your pattern. Since your pattern includes slashes, it’s easier to use a different regex delimiter, as suggested in the comments:

$pattern="@::tower_unit::(\d+)::/tower_unit::@"; 
preg_match_all($pattern,$text,$matches);

I also converted (.*) to (\d+), which is better if the token you’re looking for will always be a number. Plus, you might want to lose the i modifier if the text is always lower cased.