Question

I made a custom function which acts like bbCode. I’m using preg_replace and regex. The only problem is that if I use more than one bbCode formatting, then just only one works..

[align=center][img]myimagelink[/img][/align]

If I enter this line, then the image appears BUT the [align=center]image[/align] also. How can I avoid this problem?

$patterns[2] = '@\[align=(.*)\](.*)\[\/align\]@si';
$patterns[9] = '@\[img\](.*\.jpg)\[\/img\]@si';
$replacements[2] = '<table align=\1><tr><td align=\1>\2</td></tr></table>';//ALIGN
$replacements[9] = '<img src=\"$1\"/>';//image

Answer 1

Changing the .* expressions to non-greedy (.*?) will work for you.

Example:

$in = '[align=center][img]myimagelink[/img][/align]';
$patterns = array(
    '~\[align=(left|right|center)\](.*?)\[/align\]~' => '<div style="text-align: $1">$2</div>',
    '~\[img](.*?)\[/img\]~' => '<img src="$1" />',
);

$rep = preg_replace(array_keys($patterns), $patterns, $in);
echo htmlspecialchars($rep);