regular expression problem

[Paul]

Hi,

Does anyone know if it's possible to use regular expressions to grab
all content between two words. For example....

------
This is some example text to illustrate my problem and here's another
my for you.
------

I want to grab all text between the words 'some' and 'my' with the
correct result being ' example text to illustrate '

The following doesn't work with either ereg or preg_match...

some([^(my)]+)my

Anyone got any ideas? Is this even possible with regular expressions?

Thanks in advance,

Paul Maunders
www.fubra.com

[Sandman]

In article <11**********************@g49g2000cwa.googlegroups .com>,
"Paul" <pa***********@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi,

Does anyone know if it's possible to use regular expressions to grab
all content between two words. For example....

------
This is some example text to illustrate my problem and here's another
my for you.
------

I want to grab all text between the words 'some' and 'my' with the
correct result being ' example text to illustrate '

The following doesn't work with either ereg or preg_match...

some([^(my)]+)my

Anyone got any ideas? Is this even possible with regular expressions?

Of course. :)

#!/usr/bin/php
<?
$string = "This is some example text to illustrate my problem and here's
another my for you.";

if (preg_match("/some(.*?)my/", $string, $m)){
print $m[1];
}
?>


--
Sandman[.net]

[John Dunlop]

Paul wrote:

Does anyone know if it's possible to use regular expressions to grab
all content between two words. For example....

------
This is some example text to illustrate my problem and here's another
my for you.
------

I want to grab all text between the words 'some' and 'my' with the
correct result being ' example text to illustrate '
depends what you mean by 'word', a term which has various meanings.

1 approach to match what's between what's sometimes called orthographic
words could be:

`\bsome\b(.*?)\bmy\b`

the same as Sandman's but with assertions that the sequences <some> and
<my> are in fact orthographic words, that is, at both ends of each are
"word" boundaries (as defined by PHP). without these assertions the
sequence <my> appearing before the word <my> would throw the match.
The following doesn't work with either ereg or preg_match...

some([^(my)]+)my

because it's a match for <some>, then one or more of any character except
'(', 'm', 'y', or ')' until the last occurrence of <my>.

character classes are not ordered, they're lists of individual characters.

--
Jock

[John Dunlop]

John Dunlop wrote:

Paul wrote:

some([^(my)]+)my

because it's a match for <some>, then one or more of any character except
'(', 'm', 'y', or ')' until the last occurrence of <my>.

----------------------------------^^^^

meant to be 'first', the first occurrence of <my>.

--
Jock