PHP regular expression to find "email":"[email protected]" pattern

Question

I have a function that will find an email string that is in a specific format. I need to find this specific email string within the larger string. The specific email string I need to find has to be in this format:

"email":"[email protected]"

I need to find any occurrence of this type of string. Here is my function to find that:

 function find_email_schema($str){

      preg_match_all('/["email":"]+[\._a-zA-Z0-9-]+@[\._a-zA-Z0-9-]+/i', $str, $matches);

      return $matches;

  } 

However, this function isn't working as expected, it finds other emails in the larger string that aren't in this format:

"email":"[email protected]"

I only want emails that start with "email":

I know that the pattern I'm passing to preg_match_all isn't correct, but I'm not sure what I need to change to only obtain emails that comply with the above format. What do I need to alter in my regex pattern to get this working?

This is the pattern I'm using:

 /["email":"]+[\._a-zA-Z0-9-]+@[\._a-zA-Z0-9-]+/i

Answer 1

Because the "email": part is literal, you don't need to enclose it between [ ], so try this one (I also add the email address enclosing " optional with the ?):

 /"email":"?[\._a-zA-Z0-9-]+@[\._a-zA-Z0-9-]+"?/i

[ ] are used to declare character ranges like a-z indicating from a to z, like you did for the next part.

Let's try it on regex101.com: