Stupid Regex. Need help again.

[blueparukia]

Doubt I'll ever be able to use regex properly.

What I need is a regex that will match:

Text
And:
Text
And:
Text
And:
Text


I've tried all sorts of crap, but since I just can't wrap my head around regex, I doubt any of it was real regex.

Now I am sick of saying regex.

Thank you,

Josh

[nico_swd]

'~\[spoiler(?:[ ]?=[ ]?(["\'])?([^"\'\]]+)\1?)?\](.*?)\[/spoiler\]~si'



Regex isn't that hard once you know the basics. Check: www.phpvideotutorials.com/regex/

[blueparukia]

Thanks. Halfway through the video now :D

Still a little confused though, cause now nothing is showing up in the replace.

I thought the title would come out as $1 and the inner text would be $2, but it doesn't seem so :S

EDIT: Its $2 and $3. Got it.

Thanks again

[nico_swd]

Just for clarification: The first group starts with a colon followed by a question mark (:?), which means this group won't be captured in the $matches array.

[blueparukia]

Cool.

And just curious (always wondered about regex, since you can't directly manipulate the "variables" afaik.

Can you have it, so that if a group is empty, replace it with something else?

[nico_swd]

I don't think I understand your question. Can you give me an example?

[blueparukia]

Say, using my example, if we have

Test

It outputs something like:

Hello<br/>Test

But if we just had Test

The output would be:

<br/>Test

And say I wanted a default value - such as "Title".

Then if I had
Test

it would output:


Title<br/>Test


So just a default for one of the matches really...

[nico_swd]

I don't think that's possible to specify directly in the regular expression itself. But I guess you could do something like:

$pattern = '~\[spoiler(?:[ ]?=[ ]?(["\'])?([^"\'\]]+)\1?)?\](.*?)\[/spoiler\]~si';
$text = preg_replace_callback($pattern, '__callback_handler', $text);

function __callback_handler($matches)
{
return sprintf("%s<br />\n%s",
!empty($matches[2]) ? $matches[2] : 'Title',
!empty($matches[3]) ? $matches[3] : 'Default'
);
}

[blueparukia]

Ahh, I ended it up doing a longer way - easier to understand, but may not be as efficient.

I used a another preg_replace() to replace any one with no attribute with one that does have an attribute.

So [spoiler=] or [spoiler] become [spoiler="Title"]

Thanks

BP