Trying to select something within text with a regex

Question

Hi, My company has a series of websites with very similar domain names based on the city. The format for these is http://locksmithdallas.com or http://locksmithgarland.com. I'd like to figure out a way to interpret Dallas and Garland out of the domain names in php. I'm a noob at regex, so I could really use some help!

Answer 1

if (preg_match('/locksmith([^.]*)\.com/', $url, $matches)) {
    $city = $matches[1];
}

Answer 2

if (preg_match('#locksmith([^.]*)\.com#', $url, $matches)) {
    //has been found
    var_dump($matches);
}

Answer 3

This one's simple but you can elaborate from there:

http://locksmith(?<name>[a-zA-Z]+)\.com

That will give you a named group called "name" where you can grab the text after locksmith and before .com.