How to Extract Multiple Text Segments Enclosed in Square Brackets using PHP?

Capturing Multiple Text Segments Between Square Brackets in PHP

Question:

How to capture all text segments enclosed within square brackets in a given string?

Answer:

To capture multiple text segments between square brackets, use the following regular expression:

/\[[^\]]*\]/

This regex matches any string that begins with a square bracket, contains any number of non-square-bracket characters, and ends with a square bracket.

To extract the captured segments, use the preg_match_all() function. This function takes the regex pattern and the target string as input and returns an array containing all matches. The following PHP code demonstrates how to capture multiple text segments using this regex:

$text = '[This] is a [test] string, [eat] my [shorts].';
preg_match_all("/\[[^\]]*\]/", $text, $matches);
var_dump($matches[0]);

This code produces the following output:

array(4) {
  [0] =>
  string(5) "[This]"
  [1] =>
  string(5) "[test]"
  [2] =>
  string(5) "[eat]"
  [3] =>
  string(7) "[shorts]"
}

Alternative for Extracting Text without Brackets:

To extract only the text within the square brackets, use the following regex:

/\[([^\]]*)\]/

This regex matches any string that begins with a square bracket, contains any number of non-square-bracket characters, and ends with a square bracket. The characters within the brackets are grouped using parentheses.

To extract the captured segments without the square brackets, use the 1 st capture group, as shown in the following PHP code:

preg_match_all("/\[([^\]]*)\]/", $text, $matches);
var_dump($matches[1]);

This code produces the following output:

array(4) {
  [0] =>
  string(4) "This"
  [1] =>
  string(4) "test"
  [2] =>
  string(3) "eat"
  [3] =>
  string(6) "shorts"
}

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