CODEWITHSUNDEEP
phpreplacepreg-replace
Lumix1991
Lumix1991

Reputation: 51

PHP preg_replace between string and quotes

I have a config file with the following content in it;

[settings]
; absolute path to the temp dir. If empty the default system tmp directory will be used
temp_path = ""

; if set to true: detects if the contents are UTF-8 encoded and if not encodes them
; if set to false do nothing
encode_to_UTF8 = "false"

; default document language
language = "en-US"

; default paper size
paper_size = "A4"

[license]
; license code
code = "8cf34efe0b57013668df0dbcdf8c82a9"

I need to replace the key between the code = "*" to something else, how can I do this with preg_replace()? The config file contains more options so I only need to replace the key between

code = "*replace me*"

It should be something like this;

$licenseKey = 'newLicenseKey';
$configFileContent = file_get_contents(configFile.ini);
$configFileContent = preg_replace('/(code = ")(.*)(")/', $licenseKey, $configFileContent);

But this replaces the whole line with only the new licenseKey.

How can i do this?

Upvotes: 4

Views: 344

Answers (2)

klaar
klaar

Reputation: 621

You need something called PCRE Lookaround Assertions, more specifically: positive lookahead (?=suffix) and lookbehind (?<=prefix). This means you can match prefixes and suffixes without capturing them, so they will not be lost during a regex match&replace.

Your code, using those:

$licenseKey = 'newLicenseKey';
$configFileContent = file_get_contents(configFile.ini);
$configFileContent = preg_replace('/(?<=code = ")(.*)(?=")/', $licenseKey, $configFileContent);

Upvotes: 7

Elias Van Ootegem
Elias Van Ootegem

Reputation: 76395

Like I said in my comment, I'd tackle this issue by treating the file as what it is an INI file.

  1. Parse the file
  2. Update values that need to change
  3. overwrite the file or do something else (depending on your needs)

I'll assume you want to update the file, so in this example, I'll overwrite it:

$iniData = parse_ini_file('configFile.ini', true);//quote the filename
foreach ($iniData as $section => $params) {
    if (isset($params['code'])) {
        $params['code'] = $newCode;
        $iniData[$section] = $params;//update section
    }
}
//write to new file
$lines = [];//array of lines
foreach ($iniData as $section => $params) {
    $lines[] = sprintf('[%s]', $section);
    foreach ($params as $k => $v) {
        $lines[] = sprintf('%s = "%s");
    }
}
file_put_contents('configFile.ini', implode(PHP_EOL, $lines));

You can combine both loops quite easily, to simplify the code:

$lines = [];
foreach ($iniData as $section => $params) {
    if (isset($params['code'])) {
        $params['code'] = $newCode;
    }
    $lines[] = sprintf('[%s]', $section);
    foreach ($params as $k => $v) {
        $lines[] = sprintf('%s = "%s");
    }
}

Upvotes: 1

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