Question

I would to grab whatever text is between “[e-mail]” and “This e-mail (and attachment(s)) is confidential, proprietary,” but dont know what is the best and most reliable way to do this. I thought regex but perhaps someone knows better. the number of empty lines may increase or decrease but those 2 strings will always have text between them. In this case the text is “testttinggg”

---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: person name Date: 2011/12/1 Subject: RE: this is a test subject To: [e-mail]

    testingggggg

    This e-mail (and attachment(s)) is confidential, proprietary,

I tried to write

       preg_match('/nadal@gmail\.com(.*?)This e-mail \(and attachment\(s\)\) is confidential,/', $wholeBody, $matches);     echo $matches[1];

but it didnt work..

Answer 1

You’re on the right way with your regex. You have to remember that the dot . does not include linebreaks by default so you have to add the DOTALL modifier.

You can try this. In capturegroup 1 you’ll have the content (without the empty whitespaces and linebreaks)

(?<=[e-mail])\s*(.*?)\s*(?=This e-mail \(and attachment\(s\)\) is confidential, proprietary,)

You can see it in action here: http://regexr.com?2vc19

Update:

preg_match('/(?<=[e-mail])\s*(.*?)\s*(?=This e-mail \(and attachment\(s\)\) is confidential, proprietary,)/s', $message, $matches);

http://codepad.viper-7.com/C6Mxqd