1

I need help on regular expression here.

I want PHP to be able to split a string in sections of arrays such that a substring enclosed by <%me %> will be in its own slot.

So for example, 

Hi there how are <%me date(); %> => {"Hi there how are ", "<%me date(); %>} 
Hi there how are you<%me date(); %> => {"Hi there how are you", "<%me date(); %>}
Hi there how are you<%me date(); %>goood => {"Hi there how are you", "<%me date(); %>, "good"
Hi there how are you<%me date(); %> good => {"Hi there how are you", "<%me date(); %>}, " good"}

Note the white space won't stop the tags from getting parsed in.

sanders
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denniss
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  • Your examples aren't making sense. Where's the `;` coming from? What's this `"},` supposed to mean? Some double quotes are missing! Some closing curlies are missing! Please fix for the benefit of everyone involved. – polygenelubricants Jul 23 '10 at 19:07
  • Can the tag part contains `%` too? – polygenelubricants Jul 23 '10 at 19:33
  • well preg_split is supposed to term a string into an array given a regex pattern. So I need the regex that will turn the string into an array to the right of it. Sorry that was my mistake, but there should be semicolon at the end of each date(). – denniss Jul 23 '10 at 19:50

1 Answers1

3

On capturing the splitting delimiter in PREG

You can use PREG_SPLIT_DELIM_CAPTURE to split on and capture the delimiter.

Remember to put the delimiter in a capturing group (…) for this to work properly.

Here's an example:

$text = 'abc123xyz456pqr';

$parts = preg_split('/(\d+)/', $text, -1, PREG_SPLIT_DELIM_CAPTURE);

print_r($parts);

This prints (as seen on ideone.com):

Array
(
    [0] => abc
    [1] => 123
    [2] => xyz
    [3] => 456
    [4] => pqr
)

References

Back to the question

In this case, you can try the delimiter pattern (<%me[^%]+%>). That is:

  • <%me, literally
  • [^%]+, i.e. anything but %
  • %>, literally
  • The whole thing captured in group 1

If % can appear in the tag, then you can try something like (<%me.*?%>).

Here's an example:

$text = 'prefix<%me date() %>suffix';

$parts = preg_split('/(<%me[^%]+%>)/', $text, -1, PREG_SPLIT_DELIM_CAPTURE);

print_r($parts);

The above prints (as seen on ideone.com):

Array
(
    [0] => prefix
    [1] => <%me date() %>
    [2] => suffix
)

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polygenelubricants
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