CODEWITHSUNDEEP
phpregex
glasstree
glasstree

Reputation: 257

PHP preg_match_all matches correctly but only gives one match

I'm using this regex to pull out sections from content submitted by a user:

preg_match_all("~\[section name=[\"|'](.*?)[\"|']\](.*?)\[\/section\]~", $content, $matches, PREG_SET_ORDER);

The purpose is to allow non-technical users to easily create different named sections. As far as I can tell, PHP's bbcode parser won't allow me to pull out contents and attribute values into an array in this way.

I'm not sure why the accepted answer at preg_match_all parsing, only one match was accepted, because it suggests that preg_match_all doesn't globally match by default, and the suggested g flag seems to be invalid.

The current function correctly matches so that:

[section name="one"]this is section one[/section]

Gets put into $matches:

array (size=1)
    0 => 
        array (size=3)
            0 => string '[section name="one"]this is section one[/section]'
            1 => string 'one'
            2 => string 'this is section one'

This is the desired behavior.

However, it doesn't add further matches to the $matches array, only the first.

What do I need to do to have $matches populated with all the matches in the given string?

Upvotes: 1

Views: 191

Answers (1)

sunshinejr
sunshinejr

Reputation: 4854

It is strange, because when I run the script:

    $content = '[section name="one"]this is section one[/section]<br />[section name="two"]this is section two[/section]';
    preg_match_all("~\[section name=[\"|'](.*?)[\"|']\](.*?)\[\/section\]~", $content, $matches, PREG_SET_ORDER);
    print_r($matches);

It prints:

Array
(
[0] => Array
    (
        [0] => [section name="one"]this is section one[/section]
        [1] => one
        [2] => this is section one
    )

[1] => Array
    (
        [0] => [section name="two"]this is section two[/section]
        [1] => two
        [2] => this is section two
    )

)

Upvotes: 1

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