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PHP Regular Expression - Repeating Match of a Group

Asked 2010-02-05T03:56:01.550
10

I have a string that may look something like this:

$r = 'Filed under: <a>Group1</a>, <a>Group2</a>';

Here is the regular expression I am using so far:

preg_match_all("/Filed under: (?:<a.*?>([\w|\d|\s]+?)<\/a>)+?/", $r, $matches);

I want the regular expression to inside the () to continue to make matches as designated with the +? at the end. But it just won't do it. ::sigh::

Any ideas. I know there has to be a way to do this in one regular expression instead of breaking it up.

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1 Answer

8

Try:

<?php

$r = 'Filed under: <a>Group1</a>, <a>Group2</a>, <a>Group3</a>, <a>Group4</a>';

if(preg_match_all("/<a.*?>([^<]*?)<\/a>/", $r, $matches)) {
    var_dump($matches[1]); 
}

?>

output:

array(4) {
  [0]=>
  string(6) "Group1"
  [1]=>
  string(6) "Group2"
  [2]=>
  string(6) "Group3"
  [3]=>
  string(6) "Group4"
}

EDIT:

Since you want to include the string 'Filed under' in the search to uniquely identify the match, you can try this, I'm not sure if it can be done using a single call to preg_match

// Since you want to match everything after 'Filed under'
if(preg_match("/Filed under:(.*)$/", $r, $matches)) {
    if(preg_match_all("/<a.*?>([^<]*?)<\/a>/", $matches[1], $matches)) {
        var_dump($matches[1]); 
    }
}
answered 2010-02-05T04:17:16.607

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