Need help with a regular expression in PHP

Question

I have the following line:

<?php echo $this->__("mytext");?>somesometext")moretext

and I need a regular expression to grab 'mytext'. The best I could come up with is:

/\$this->__\([\'"](.*)[\'"]\)/

but in this case it returns:

mytext");?>somesometext

Can anyone get this to work?

Answer 1

/\$this->__\([\'"](.*?)[\'"]\)/

should work. The ? switches the match-mode to ungreedy.

Answer 2

/\$this->__\([\'"](.*?)[\'"]\)/

The ? makes the * quantifier ungreedy.

Answer 3

Better use PHP’s ability to parse its own code with token_get_all, step through the tokens and stop at the first T_CONSTANT_ENCAPSED_STRING token.