CODEWITHSUNDEEP
phpregextext-extractiontext-parsingdelimited
endo.anaconda
endo.anaconda

Reputation: 2478

Extract values from a double-pipe- separated string also wrapped in pipes and square braces

I want to parse a string into three variables. My formatted input string starts with [|, the 3 sought values are delimited by ||, and the string ends with |].

Intention:

'[|'.$1.'||'.$2.'||'.$3.'|]'

What I have tried doesn't produce the desired results:

preg_match_all("[|(.*)||(.*)||(.*)|]", $loadedList, $result);

Upvotes: 1

Views: 572

Answers (3)

Benubird
Benubird

Reputation: 19547

You need to escape the special characters:

preg_match_all("/\[\|(.*)\|\|(.*)\|\|(.*)\|\]/", $loadedList, $result);

Upvotes: 3

jwueller
jwueller

Reputation: 31006

What about this? It will work for a variable amout of items.

$result = explode('||', preg_replace('/(^\[\||\|\]$)/', '', $loadedList));

Upvotes: 4

Tim Pietzcker
Tim Pietzcker

Reputation: 336468

| is a metacharacter in regular expressions (meaning "or"), so it needs to be escaped if meant to match literally. Furthermore, [...] is regex syntax for a character class, meaning "any one of the characters between [...]). And finally, you need delimiters around your regular expression.

You could try 

preg_match_all("/[^\[\]\|]+/")

to match all non-|/[/] strings, i. e. everything except |, [ or ].

Upvotes: 1

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