Regular expression match, extracting only wanted segments of string
- by Ben Carey
I am trying to extract three segments from a string. As I am not particularly good with regular expressions, I think what I have done could probably be done better...
I would like to extract the bold parts of the following string:
SOMETEXT: ANYTHING_HERE (Old=ANYTHING_HERE,
New=ANYTHING_HERE)
Some examples could be:
ABC: Some_Field (Old=,New=123)
ABC: Some_Field (Old=ABCde,New=1234)
ABC: Some_Field (Old=Hello World,New=Bye Bye World)
So the above would return the following matches:
$matches[0] = 'Some_Field';
$matches[1] = '';
$matches[2] = '123';
So far I have the following code:
preg_match_all('/^([a-z]*\:(\s?)+)(.+)(\s?)+\(old=(.+)\,(\s?)+new=(.+)\)/i',$string,$matches);
The issue with the above is that it returns a match for each separate segment of the string. I do not know how to ensure the string is the correct format using a regular expression without catching and storing the match if that makes sense?
So, my question, if not already clear, how I can retrieve just the segments that I want from the above string?
