Find a regex to take part of Email

Question

I have the following emails I need to extract a part from:

Bestellnummer xxx:
  1 von xxx, 1er Pack

  ------------- Anfang der Nachricht -------------

  foo bar baz foo bar baz         // <<<<< I need this text here

  ------------- Ende der Nachricht -------------


  ------------- Anfang der Nachricht -------------

  foo bar baz foo bar baz

  ------------- Ende der Nachricht -------------

There are 0 to unlimited occurences of

------------- Anfang der Nachricht -------------
------------- Ende der Nachricht -------------

and I'm able to extract the first part with this regex:

$re = "/------------- .*? -------------.?(.*?).?------------- .*? -------------/s"; 

But, as I'm quite new on learning regex, I'm pretty sure there must be a better regex to extract this part (foo bar baz foo bar baz) of the text between

------------- Anfang der Nachricht -------------
------------- Ende der Nachricht -------------

As this can be in different languages, I'm using

 .?

To match everything between those hyphens.

I need the first occurence of this text no matter how many occurences there are. Is there are more solid solution for this regex?

Here's a

demo at regex101.com

Answer 1

I ended up with: $regexp = '/Nachricht\s-+\s+(.*?)\s+-+\sEnde/s';

So, it saves a few matching steps and does a bit of trimming on the message.

More solid regexp.. it just works. Write a test to be on the safe side.

• \s - matches space
• -+ - matches one or more - chars
• \s+ - matches one or more spaces; before/after the message to trim the message
• (.*?)- for the message

Demo at regex101.com