Capturing text between square brackets in PHP

Question

I need some way of capturing the text between square brackets. So for example, the following string:

[This] is a [test] string, [eat] my [shorts].

Could be used to create the following array:

Array (       [0] => [This]       [1] => [test]       [2] => [eat]       [3] => [shorts]  ) 

I have the following regex, /\[.*?\]/ but it only captures the first instance, so:

Array ( [0] => [This] ) 

How can I get the output I need? Note that the square brackets are NEVER nested, so that's not a concern.

Answer 1

Matches all strings with brackets:

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

If You want strings without brackets:

$text = '[This] is a [test] string, [eat] my [shorts].'; preg_match_all("/\[([^\]]*)\]/", $text, $matches); var_dump($matches[1]); 

Alternative, slower version of matching without brackets (using "*" instead of "[^]"):

$text = '[This] is a [test] string, [eat] my [shorts].'; preg_match_all("/\[(.*?)\]/", $text, $matches); var_dump($matches[1]);