Hope I don't get beaten up about this. I'm new to regex and I know there are tons of resources out there, but my problem is that I want to do a few specific things and I cant seem to figure out how to piece the expression together.
Say this is a snippet of my string:
AudienceTypes=Internal; InternallearnerName=Ryan Litwiller; uName=227812;
I want to search for InternallearnerName= and store what comes after = up to the semi colon as a variable.
As an alternative to preg_match() I have tried to start working out a solution using preg_split by semicolon, array_search(), then substr() but really thought a regex would be a much simpler solution.
Here you go:
<?php
$s='AudienceTypes=Internal; InternallearnerName=Ryan Litwiller; uName=227812;';
preg_match( '/\bInternallearnerName=([^;]+)/', $s, $matches );
echo $matches[1], "\n";
The regular expression:
\b means 'word boundary', so it won't match FOOInternallearnerName=...(..) defines a group; the first pair will be number 1.[^..] is a single character that is NOT (^) one of the following; in this case ;. So, it matches any character except ;.+ means 1 or more.$matches will store the matches. $matches[0] will store the entire matched string, and $matches[1] the first group. ($matches[2] would store the second, except you only have one group (..) in the regular expression.
To match the value of uName aswell use this:
preg_match( '/\bInternallearnerName=([^;]+.*?\buName=([^;]+)/', $s, $matches );
Here, $matches[2] will be 227812.
Note that the first and last character of the regular expression, / in this case, are only there to mark the beginning/ending of the regular expression. Strictly speaking they are not needed, but this is probably legacy. You can use other characters there aswell; for instance, if you're matching URLs or file paths you could use @: preg_match( "@.....@", ....).
Also, preg_match returns false if there is no match, so you should check for it: