Question

I’m having problems writing a php function to search for a certain text in a php file. I’m not good with regular expressions so I think that’s the problem.

I need the regular expression to have a start word and end word and should return the text found in between.
This is what I tried:

$handle1 = fopen($file, "r");
$fileContents = fread($handle1,filesize($file));
if (preg_match('/'.$start. '((.|\n)*)'. $end.'/', $fileContents, $match)) {
$text=preg_split('/'.$start.'((.|\n)*)'. $end.'/', $match[0]);
echo $text. " found in $file<br/>";
}

Can anybody help please ?

Answer 1

<?php
$str = 'Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consetetur sadipscing elitr, sed diam nonumy eirmod tempor invidunt ut labore et dolore magna aliquyam erat, sed diam voluptua. ...';

$start = 'sadipscing';
$end = 'dolore';

$pattern = sprintf(
    '/%s(.+?)%s/ims',
    preg_quote($start, '/'), preg_quote($end, '/')
);

if (preg_match($pattern, $str, $matches)) {
    list(, $match) = $matches;
    echo $match;
}

Where $str should be the contents of your file.

Have a look at: http://www.php.net/manual/en/reference.pcre.pattern.modifiers.php for the i, m and s modifiers.