Question

What’s the best/most efficient way to extract text set between parenthesis? Say I wanted to get the string ‘text’ from the string ‘ignore everything except this (text)’ in the most efficient manner possible.

So far, the best I’ve come up with is this:

$fullString = 'ignore everything except this (text)'; $start = strpos('(', $fullString); $end = strlen($fullString) - strpos(')', $fullString);  $shortString = substr($fullString, $start, $end); 

Is there a better way to do this? I know in general using regex tends to be less efficient, but unless I can reduce the number of function calls, perhaps this would be the best approach? Thoughts?

Answer 1

i’d just do a regex and get it over with. unless you are doing enough iterations that it becomes a huge performance issue, it’s just easier to code (and understand when you look back on it)

$text = 'ignore everything except this (text)'; preg_match('#\((.*?)\)#', $text, $match); print $match[1];