PHP - Preg_match shortest matches

Question

I'm trying to get "content" from this string:

$string = "start start content end";

with preg_match like this:

preg_match('/start(.*?)end/', $string, $matches);
echo $match[1];

but, problem is $matches[1] returns start content not only content because there are two start in $string (and maybe more)

How to get only content part with preg_match?

Answer 1

Using a negative lookahead:

$string = "start start content end";
preg_match('/start\h*((?:(?!start).)*)end/', $string, $matches);
echo $matches[1];
// content

(?:(?!start).) will match any character if that is not followed by start.