Question

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Get content between two strings PHP

I am trying to create a php function that will return an array of all occurrences of text between two substrings. I am useless at regular expression and would find this very handy, I’m sure there is already a very nice one out there but I can’t find it.

    function getAllBetweenStr($input, $start, $end)
    {
         //DO STUFF

         //RETURN ARRAY
    }


$inputStr ="<a href='http://formaco4/en/abc' class='currentLink' hreflang='en'>abc1/a>
<a href='http://formaco4/en/abc/b1'  hreflang='en'>abc2</a>
<a href='http://formaco4/en/abc/b2'  hreflang='en'>abc3</a>
<a href='http://formaco4/en/abc/b3'  hreflang='en'>abc4</a>";


$linkStr = array();
$linkStr = getAllBetweenStr($inputStr, "http://formaco4/en/'", "'  hreflang")

The return array would be like this
Array([0] => “abc/b1”, [1] => “abc/b2”, … , [n] => “gingers/rule”)

I have this function already if it helps:

    function getBetweenStr($string, $start, $end)
    {
        $string = " ".$string;
        $ini = strpos($string,$start);
        if ($ini == 0) return "";
        $ini += strlen($start);    
        $len = strpos($string,$end,$ini) - $ini;
        return substr($string,$ini,$len);
    }

Answer 1

I believe something like this will work – It uses preg_match_all to capture anything between the two $start and $end strings.

function getBetweenStr($string, $start, $end)
{
    preg_match_all( '/' . preg_quote( $start, '/') . '(.*?)' . preg_quote( $end, '/') . '/', $string, $matches);
    return $matches[1];
}