Question

I’ve a text stored in a value, and I only want to get the text after “eindformaat”.
Here is the text:

$desc = 'Folder DIN A4 2-breuk altaarvouw
135g druk glanzend
4/4 kleurig (dubbelzijdige druk)
2-breuk altaarvouw

eindformaat: 29,7 cm x 41,9 cm
gevouwen eindformaat: 20,95 cm x 29,7 cm
gegevensformaat: 29,9 cm x 42,1 cm';

What I want is the value after “eindformaat”. So this will be: 29,7 cm x 41,9 cm in this case.
I tried a lot of patterns with preg_replace. But none of them works for me.
I tried this, but it didn’t work:

preg_replace('/\/eindformaat\/.*/', '', $desc);

Can somebody help me out? Thanks.

Answer 1

You don’t want preg_replace, but preg_match for extracting. And then just leave out the escaped \/ slashes, as those are not present in the text.

 preg_match('/eindformaat:(.*)/', $desc, $result);
 print $result[1];

You need (.*) in parens, so it becomes the result capture group [1]. Also .* is sufficient as it won’t match beyond the linebreak without regex /s flag.

The actual advantage of a regex is that you can make it super-specific:

 preg_match('/eindformaat: ((\d+|,|cm|\s|x)+)/', $desc, $result);

And as @Jpsy points out, if you really only want to match the first eindformaat:, not the second with a preceding word, then add an ^ anchor and the /m regex flag, like so:

 preg_match('/^eindformaat: ....../m', $desc, $result);