I am trying to match parts of a dynamically generated string and make a replacement based on the extracted information. My problem is that I can't fathom how to craft the regex.
What I have is a few different placeholder strings like the following.:
[@img:1234567890][@user:1234567890][@file:file_name-with.ext]Strings like this are passed through with the intent of being replaced with links, and/or more readable names. But again, I can't come up with a regex for any given one of them.
I am looking for the format: [@word:] of which I will strip the [, ], @, and word from the string so I can then turn around an query my DB accordingly for whatever it is and work with it accordingly. Just the regex bit is holding me back.
Not sure what you mean by generators. I always use online matchers to see that my test cases work. @Virendra almost had it except forgot to escape the [] charaters.
/\[@(\w+):(.*)\]/
You need to start and end with a regex delimeter, in this case the '/' character.
Then we escape the '[]' which is use by regex to match ranges of characters hence the '['.
Next we match a literal '@' symbol.
Now we want to save this next match so we can use it later so we surround it with ().
\w matches a word. Basically any characters that aren't spaces, punctuation, or line characters.
Again match a literal :.
Maybe useful to have the second part in a match group as well so (.*) will match any character any number of times, and save it for you.
Then we escape the closing ] as we did earlier.
Since it sounds like you want to use the matches later in a query we can use preg_match to save the matches to an array.
$pattern = '/\[@(\w+):(.*)\]/';
$subject = '[@user:1234567890]';
preg_match($pattern, $subject, $matches);
print_r($matches);
Would output
array(
[0] => '[@user:1234567890]', // Full match
[1] => 'user', // First match
[2] => '1234567890' // Second match
)
An especially helpful tool I've found is txt2re