How to get a substring between two strings in PHP?

Question

If the strings are different (ie: [foo] & [/foo]), take a look at this post from Justin Cook. I copy his code below:

function get_string_between($string, $start, $end){
    $string = ' ' . $string;
    $ini = strpos($string, $start);
    if ($ini == 0) return '';
    $ini += strlen($start);
    $len = strpos($string, $end, $ini) - $ini;
    return substr($string, $ini, $len);
}

$fullstring = 'this is my [tag]dog[/tag]';
$parsed = get_string_between($fullstring, '[tag]', '[/tag]');

echo $parsed; // (result = dog)

Regular expressions is the way to go:

$str = 'before-str-after';
if (preg_match('/before-(.*?)-after/', $str, $match) == 1) {
    echo $match[1];
}

onlinePhp

function getBetween($string, $start = "", $end = ""){
    if (strpos($string, $start)) { // required if $start not exist in $string
        $startCharCount = strpos($string, $start) + strlen($start);
        $firstSubStr = substr($string, $startCharCount, strlen($string));
        $endCharCount = strpos($firstSubStr, $end);
        if ($endCharCount == 0) {
            $endCharCount = strlen($firstSubStr);
        }
        return substr($firstSubStr, 0, $endCharCount);
    } else {
        return '';
    }
}

Sample use:

echo getBetween("abc","a","c"); // returns: 'b'

echo getBetween("hello","h","o"); // returns: 'ell'

echo getBetween("World","a","r"); // returns: ''

function getInnerSubstring($string,$delim){
    // "foo a foo" becomes: array(""," a ","")
    $string = explode($delim, $string, 3); // also, we only need 2 items at most
    // we check whether the 2nd is set and return it, otherwise we return an empty string
    return isset($string[1]) ? $string[1] : '';
}

Example of use:

var_dump(getInnerSubstring('foo Hello world foo','foo'));
// prints: string(13) " Hello world "

If you want to remove surrounding whitespace, use trim. Example:

var_dump(trim(getInnerSubstring('foo Hello world foo','foo')));
// prints: string(11) "Hello world"