Question

I’m trying to make a regular expression that will select only the first string of two strings.

IE:

hello:howareyou

I want the regex to return only hello.

Similarly, I would want another one to return howareyou, but I should be able to figure that out once I understand the first part.

Thank you!

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EDIT:

So far I have tried (?:[^"<:]|"[^"]*"|<[^>]*)* but that merely splits the two.

Answer 1

You could simply use explode(':', $str), but if you insist on using a regular expression, you can do that as well with preg_match('/(.+?):(.+)/', $str, $matches) which will return the first part in $matches[1] and the second part in $matches[2].