PHP / regular expression matching

Question

I've got a piece of text that contains another regular expression.

Sample text:

...<rege>!^.*$!mailto:[email protected]!</rege>...

What I want to match is:

mailto:[email protected]

This didn't work:

 $patterns[] = '/<rege>!\^\.\*\$!(.*)!<\/rege>/';

Thoughts?

Answer 1

Try with this:

$patterns[] = '/<rege>!\^\.\*\$!([^<]*)!<\/rege>/';

Answer 2

To have \ inside '' you have to double it like so:

$patterns[] = '/<rege>!\\^\\.\\*\\$!(.*)!<\\/rege>/';

I also think that you may want this match to be ungreedy because you want to properly capture email even if similar constructs occur in search text multiple times so:

$patterns[] = '/<rege>!\\^\\.\\*\\$!(.*?)!<\\/rege>/';

Answer 3

You need to escape your backslashes:

<?php

$sample = "<rege>!^.*$!mailto:[email protected]!</rege>";
preg_match("/<rege>!\\^\\.\\*\\$!(.*)!<\/rege>/",$sample,$matches);

print_r($matches);
?>