Question

I need a simple markup language to store different parts of a string on a TEXT field, and then extract those parts.
So basically I want some kind of simple XML. Storing those in the table field is easy, but extracting them… is other matter.
I managed to do so using a simple regex done for regular HTML:

|<[^>]+>(.*)</[^>]+>|U

But in order to re-compose the original array (and use the markup more generally) I need also to know the tag names. And that regex does’t do that.

Examples:

Input text:

<user_input>Hello! my name is Williams</user_input>

The preg_match_all() function using the above regex returns:

array
  0 => 
    array
      0 => string '<user_input>Hello! my name is Williams</user_input>' (length=34)

  1 => 
    array
      0 => string 'Hello! my name is Williams' (length=34)

I need it to return the “user_input” name of the tag. Yes, I know, I suck on regex. Yes, I know “use a XML parser”, but that is too big for what I’am doing.

Answer 1

Just use a capturing group like you did with the content:

|<([^>]+)>([^<]*)</\1>|

As an added bonus, you can use the captured name to make sure the closing tag has the same name.