Extracting string...

andy206uk posted this at 21:58 — 12th February 2007.

Joined: Jul 2002

Hi all,

I'm currently in the process of writing a script to parse an email that I get from my message board so that rather than having to click through emails to manually approve members, I can do it via a web page.

As part of this, I need to extract the username from the email. The username is always contained within quote marks (i.e. "username")

Does anyone know if there is a php function that will match a regular expression and give you the matched text as a variable? I thought preg_match would do the job but from what I can tell that just returns a count of how many times it matches?

Also, does anyone know what the regular expression would be?

I've tried: \"+[a-zA-Z0-9]\" (one or more alpha numeric characters) but that didnt seem to work.

What I guess I really need is a quote mark followed by up to 50 of anything then another quote mark... any ideas? I hate regex! (but seriously need to learn it!)

Andy

Abhishek Reddy posted this at 00:58 — 13th February 2007.

He has: 3,348 posts

Joined: Jul 2001

andy206uk;214983 wrote: Hi all,
Does anyone know if there is a php function that will match a regular expression and give you the matched text as a variable? I thought preg_match would do the job but from what I can tell that just returns a count of how many times it matches?

It does return only the number of matches, but preg_match() will work. It takes an argument called matches that names a variable in which the function will store an array of successfully matched strings.

This is the bizarre world of PHP, after all.