Question

I’m looking for a regex that could replace all “[” with an “->” but only when it’s not followed by “]”.

And replace at the same time all of the “]” with nothing, but only when they are not next to an “[“

So in other word “test[hi][]” will be become “test->hi[]”

Thank you 😉

I really have no clue how to do that 😉

Answer 1

I’ve made the assumptions that what exist between the brackets follows PHP variable naming conventions (i.e. letters, digits, underscores) and your code is valid (e.g. no $test['five]).

echo preg_replace('/\[[\'"]?(\w+)[\'"]?\]/', '->\1', $input);

This should handle:

test[one]
test['two']
test["three"]

But not:

test[$four]