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Asked: 2026-05-27T17:35:06+00:00

I’m looking for a regular expression to match all functions blocks (from start to

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I’m looking for a regular expression to match all functions blocks (from start to end) in php files. For example:

function test_function($var) {
 if ($var == 'somethin') {
 print 'hi';
 }
 etc.
}

I need the start offset and end offset of the block. What regex can I use?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    It is very very complicated and can’t be done with one regular expression.

    You may think that you can easily match `the beginning of a function like this:

    \bfunction\b\s+\S+[^\(](\s+)?\(.*?\)\s+\{

    But you can’t because what is if there is this in a code?

    $string = "function myfunction() {}";

    So you should search on everything what isn’t quoted. So for excluding quoted strings you can use this regular expression:

    (?:(?=(?:(?:\\.|"(?:\\.|[^"\\])*"|[^\\'"])*'(?:\\.|"(?:\\.|[^"'\\])*"|[^\\'])*')*(?:\\.|"(?:\\.|[^"\\])*"|[^\\'])*$)(?=(?:(?:\\.|'(?:\\.|[^'\\])*'|[^\\'"])*"(?:\\.|'(?:\\.|[^'"\\])*'|[^\\"])*")*(?:\\.|'(?:\\.|[^'\\])*'|[^\\"])*$)(?:\\.|[^\\'"]))+

    The next thing you should do is counting all { and } because you need to know when the function stops and I can’t think about any regular expression which can do this. So you need to do this with looping through.

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