Question

I’ve been looking all over the internet for some useful information and I think I found too much. I’m trying to understand regular expressions but don’t get it.

Lets for instance say $data="A bunch of text [link=123] another bunch of text.", and it should get replaced with "< a href=\"123.html\">123< /a>".

I’ve been trying around a lot with code similar to this:


$find = "/[link=[([0-9])]/";
$replace = "< a href=\"$1\">$1< /a>";
echo preg_replace ($find, $replace, $data);

but the output is always the same as the original $data.

I think I have to see something relevent to my problem understand the basics.

Answer 1

Remove the extra [] around the (), and add + after the [0-9] to quantify it. Also, escape the [] that make up the tag itself.

$find = "/\[link=(\d+)\]/"; // "\d" is equivalent to "[0-9]"
$replace = "<a href=\"$1.html\">$1</a>";
echo preg_replace($find,$replace,$data);