I'm writing a simple URL parser. With a regexp like following
preg_match_all('/^test\/(\w+)\/?$/', $url, $matches);
I can catch all URL like
test/5
and browsing $matches array I can get the ID, which is 5. That's fine.
With a regexp like following
preg_match_all('/^test\/((\w+)\/?)+\/(\w+)\/?$/', $url, $matches);
I can catch all URL like
test/1/5
test/1/2/5
test/1/2/3/5
... and so on.
The problem is that browsing $matches array I can't catch all the matched IDs of the variable-length part (which is ((\w+)\/?)+). I mean I don't catch 1,2,3 but 3,3,3. I get the last ID repeated N-times.
What am I missing?
I would do this job in two steps.
First, you can check the URL format:
^test(?:\/\d+)+$
Then, if the test succeeds, you can extract the IDs with this regex:
(?:\G|^test)\/\K\d+
The output array will only contain the IDs.
See the demo
(?:\G|^test) matches the end position of the previous match or test at the beginning of the string\/ matches a /\K resets the starting point of the current match, excluding here the / from result\d+ matches 1 or more digits