need some help with preg_replace and backreferences

Hello, I am struggling with this.
I am trying to grab something that is between two words and replace the entire string all these words come from with just the one thing that I matched.
I know I am doing something wrong but I don't know enough about RegEx to figure it out.
I have this:
$string = 'words and words';
// $desired_output = 'and';
$desired_output = preg_replace('/words(.+)words/','$1',$string);

can I get a nudge in the right direction please?
Thanks

 

Do you want to print the "and" word? That`s what the code you gave us does!

 

Could you give us some more examples.

 

Why are you using preg_replace... preg_match would make a lot more sense...

 

I basically want to set two delimiting words and grab ONLY what is between those words and throw out everything else there is before and after what I grabbed, you know what I mean?

 

<?php

$string = 'words and words';

preg_match('/words(?:\s+)?(?P<output>.*)(?:\s+)?words/', $string, $matches);
list(, $output) = array_map('trim', $matches);

echo $output;

PHP:

 

I figured out why it wasn't working.
I was doing (.+)
but instead it had to be (.+?)

Thanks for all your help!

You are right. I did that.

 

.+? makes the quantifier non-greedy (although more accurately, opposite of current behaviour as it can be toggled with a flag - but who cares about that).

My solution worked fine, perhaps another part of your code wasn't ideal?

Dan.

 

I wasn't implying that your solution wasn't working, I just found that with the question mark my code worked and only after that I read your post... I didn't try your code because I was following the "if it ain't broken don't fix it" philosophy ;-)

 

I wasn't implying that your solution wasn't working, I just found that with the question mark my code worked and only after that I read your post... I didn't try your code because I was following the "if it ain't broken don't fix it" philosophy ;-)