PHP: how to get only the words between a parenthesis () and clear everything else

Question

Hi, I have an array with some info.. for example:

"(writer) &"

or

"with (additional dialogue)".

I want to clean this so I only get the text between the parenthesis () and clear everything else

result:

"writer"

or

"additional dialogue"

how can I do this??

Thanks!!

Answer 1

The easiest way will be with a regular expression:

preg_match_all('/\((.*?)\)/', $input, $matches);

$matches[1], $matches[2], etc will contain everything that was between parentheses in $input. That is, $matches[1] will have whatever was between the first set of parentheses, and so on (to handle cases with multiple sets).

Answer 2

$matches = array();
$num_matched = preg_match_all('/\((.*)\)/U', $input, $matches);

Answer 3

$string = "this (is (a) test) with (two parenthesis) duh";

For a string like this you can use preg_match_all and use implode.

$string = "this (is (a) test) with (two parenthesis) duh";
$regex = '#\((([^()]+|(?R))*)\)#';
if (preg_match_all($regex, $string ,$matches)) {
    echo implode(' ', $matches[1]);
} else {
    //no parenthesis
    echo $string;
}

Or you can use preg_replace, but with multiple parenthesis you'll lose the whitespace between them.

$regex = '#[^()]*\((([^()]+|(?R))*)\)[^()]*#';
$replacement = '\1';
echo preg_replace($regex, $replacement, $string);

I got a lot of help from this page, Finer points of PHP regular expressions.