Question

The question is: How to do this using only (and a single) regex? Is it possible?

Explanation: I have an array like this:

array
(
   [0] => 'code1-{1,5}{a,c}',
   [1] => 'code2-{3,6}{s,q}'
)

and what I want to do is to get, using a regex, all the values grouped like:

code1
1,5
a,c

I know that I can get all the data inside the {...} using this regex:

'/\{([^\}]*)\}/i'

Besides I know that I can get the string before the dash using this one

/(.*?)\-/i

What I don’t know is if it’s possible to merge this two regex. Infact, if I have this regex

'/(.*?)\-\{([^\}]*)\}/i'

I can’t get all the data I need. I also know that I can do something like this:

'/(.*?)\-\{([^\}]*)\}\{([^\}]*)\}/i'

but if the format of the input will change to say 10 {…} groups, it’s no so elegant to have 10 group of the form \{([^\}]*)\} and it’s not the point of my question.

Here are the code that I’m trying:

First regex('/\{([^\}]*)\}/i'): http://ideone.com/mN3T2

Merged regex('/(.*?)\-\{([^\}]*)\}/i'): http://ideone.com/gMdOa

Answer 1

Update: After OP’s edit

I don’t believe you can merge those two regular expressions and still retain the ability to loop through the matches of the form {1,5}. I think it is better to use two separate regular expressions for this purpose, one to capture coden and another to iterate over matches of text between {}.

One way to do this is to split over - like this

$result = preg_split('/-/m', 'code1-{1,5}{a,c}');

and then you get code1 as the first entry and
{1,5}{a,c} as the second entry. Now apply your regex

\{([^\}]*)\} over the second entry and iterate over the matches.