How yo create a pattern for string match and how to get other arguments from the string

Question

I don't know how to create a regular expression. I wanted to get subtrings from a string. In my case the string is [_formatdate_form_date "D, d M y"]. I wanted the field name form_date and the string between the double quotes i.e. D, d M y. I searched for the PHP functions like preg_match but all requires a pattern. So how to create a pattern for this

Answer 1

You can do something like that :

$str = '[_formatdate_form_date "D, d M y"]';
$regex = "/_formatdate_(.*)\s\"(.*)\"/";

preg_match_all($regex, $str, $matches);
var_dump($matches);

And the result $matches :

So to acces you have to do : $matches[1][0] or $matches[2][0]

But to understand what does it make, I suggest you to learn a minimum about regular expression : Learn Regular Expression