Question

I know it’s probably a dumb question, but I am stuck trying to figure out how to make preg_match_all to do what I want…

I want to match strings that look like <[someText]>
Also, I would like to do this in a lazy fashion, so if a have a string like

$myString = '<[someText]> blah blah blah <[someOtherText]> lala [doNotMatchThis] ';

I would like to have 2 matches: ‘<[someText]>’ and ‘<[someOtherText]>’ as opposed to a single match ‘<[someText]> blah blah blah <[someOtherText]>’

I am trying to match this with the following pattern

$pattern = '<\[.+?\]>';

but for some reason, I’m getting 3 matches: [someText], [someOtherText] and [doNotMatchThis]

This leads me to believe that for some reason the angle brackets are interfering, which I find strange because they are not supposed to be metacharacters.

What am I doing wrong?

Answer 1

You’re missing correct delimiters (your < > are considered as delimiters in this case)

$pattern = '~<\[.+?\]>~';