Copy everything between x and y?

[Kerosene]

I need to copy everything between two constant/known words in a string, e.g

$string = "I am going to the market to buy eggs and bacon for breakfast";
or
$string = "I am going to the market to buy fruit for breakfast";

How can I get 'eggs and bacon', or 'fruit', or whatever else is in between 'buy' and 'for breakfast'?

[Houdas]

Regular expressions? E.g.


$string = "I am going to the market to buy eggs and bacon for breakfast";
$replace = "fruit";
$string = preg_replace("/(I am going to the market to buy)(.*?)(for breakfast)/is", "\\1 ".$replace." \\3", $string);
echo $string;

[Kerosene]

Thanks but preg_replace isn't what I'm after. Maybe I didn't explain very well..

I don't want to replace the word, I want to grab it and use it as a variable. So in the above examples, I need to get "eggs and bacon" or "fruit" into a variable.

e.g
$string = "I am going to the market to buy eggs and bacon for breakfast";
???????????????????
echo $market_purchase;

would output "eggs and bacon"

[Houdas]

OK, then just use preg_match instead of preg_replace:


$string = "I am going to the market to buy eggs and bacon for breakfast";
preg_match("/(I am going to the market to buy)(.*?)(for breakfast)/is", $string, $matches);
echo $matches[2];

[Louis11]

If you know exactly what you want you could use substr() :)

print substr('abcdef', 0, 4); // abcd

[Kerosene]

Thanks guys - I got it working.