Question

Simply put, I need to extract all strings enclosed in curly braces from a chunk of text, as in

Here is a {tag}, but here {tag_2} as well, and then again …{tag_3}… here but with some trash around it.

I would like to get an array of tag, tag_2 and tag_3.
Tags can only have word characters.

I tried this:

$tags = array();
preg_match_all("/\{\w+\}/s", $data['text'], $tags);

The tags array is returned empty if run on the above fragment of text.

Edit:

I apologize for the nuisance everyone, it turns out I messed up later on. I was catching the tags via $tags, instead of $tags[0], and thus my merged array was always empty.

Answer 1

It works fine:

<?php
$text = 'Here is a {tag}, but here {tag_2} as well, and then again ...{tag_3}... here but with some trash around it.';
$tags = array();
preg_match_all("/\{\w+\}/s", $text, $tags);
print_r($tags);
?>

produces:

Array
(
    [0] => Array
        (
            [0] => {tag}
            [1] => {tag_2}
            [2] => {tag_3}
        )

)

Your $data['text'] is probably empty.

Tested with Ideone.