Regular expression, any string between two strings with multiple occurences

Question

I'm using a simple regex in PHP to parse a custom template

$row = preg_replace_callback(
    '/\^([^\^]+)\^/', create_function ('$m', 'global $fields_ar; return $fields_ar{$m[1]};'),
    $template
    );

Basically everything between two ^ is substituted with the corresponding variable name value e.g. if $template is:

 <td>^title_source^ by ^author_source^<br/>

and

$fields_ar['title_source'] == 'my title' and  $fields_ar['author_source'] == 'my author'

$row becomes:

<td>my title by my author<br/>

Everythings works fine but I want to change the delimiter; instead of ^, which has the risk to be contained between other two ^, I want to use a string e.g. "sel3ction", however:

$row = preg_replace_callback(
    '/sel3ction([^sel3ction]+)sel3ction/', create_function ('$m', 'global $fields_ar; return $fields_ar{$m[1]};'),
    $template
    );

doesn't work; I'm pretty sure the problem is in the negative part.

Any suggestions?

I know it is not a "clean" approach, cause even the strangest string can be tricky but for the moment I want to try using this method. If you have a more standard solution, of course is welcome.

Thanks!

Answer 1

You can tell your expression not to be greedy when matching . using the lazy quantifier (?):

/sel3ction(.+?)sel3ction/

This tells the regular expression engine not to match what comes after the . (in this case, "sel3ction") with whatever else might be matched.