Question

I’m trying to script and parse a file,

Please help with regex in php to find and replace the following patterns:

From: “This is a foo[/www/bar.txt] within a foo[/etc/bar.txt]”

To: “This is a bar_txt_content within a bar2_txt_content”

Something along those lines:

$subject = "This is a foo[/www/bar.txt] within a foo[/etc/bar.txt]";
$pattern = '/regex-needed/';
preg_match($pattern, $subject, $matches);
foreach($matches as $match) {
    $subject = str_replace('foo['.$match[0].']', file_get_contents($match[0]), $subject);
}

And my second request is to have:

From: ‘This is a foo2[bar bar ] bar bar].’

To: “this is a returned”

Something along those lines:

$subject = 'This is a foo2[bar bar \] bar bar].';
$pattern = '/regex-needed/';
preg_match($pattern, $subject, $matches);
foreach($matches as $match) {
    $subject = str_replace('foo2['.$match[0].']', my_function($match[0]), $subject);
}

Please help in constructing these patterns…

Answer 1

found the correct regex I needed for escaping:

'/foo\[[^\[]*[^\\\]\]/'