Regex - Ignore some parts of string in match

Question

Here's my string:

address='St Marks Church',notes='The North East\'s premier...'

The regex I'm using to grab the various parts using match_all is

'/(address|notes)='(.+?)'/i'

The results are:

address => St Marks Church
notes => The North East\

How can I get it to ignore the \' character for the notes?

Answer 1

Not sure if you're wrapping your string with heredoc or double quotes, but a less greedy approach:

$str4 = 'address="St Marks Church",notes="The North East\'s premier..."';
preg_match_all('~(address|notes)="([^"]*)"~i',$str4,$matches);
print_r($matches);

Output

Array
(
    [0] => Array
        (
            [0] => address="St Marks Church"
            [1] => notes="The North East's premier..."
        )

    [1] => Array
        (
            [0] => address
            [1] => notes
        )

    [2] => Array
        (
            [0] => St Marks Church
            [1] => The North East's premier...
        )

)

Another method with preg_split:

//split the string at the comma
//assumes no commas in text
$parts = preg_split('!,!', $string);
foreach($parts as $key=>$value){
    //split the values at the = sign
    $parts[$key]=preg_split('!=!',$value);
    foreach($parts[$key] as $k2=>$v2){
        //trim the quotes out and remove the slashes
        $parts[$key][$k2]=stripslashes(trim($v2,"'"));
    }
}

Output looks like:

Array
(
    [0] => Array
        (
            [0] => address
            [1] => St Marks Church
        )

    [1] => Array
        (
            [0] => notes
            [1] => The North East's premier...
        )

)

Super slow old-skool method:

$len = strlen($string);
$key = "";
$value = "";
$store = array();
$pos = 0;
$mode = 'key';
while($pos < $len){
  switch($string[$pos]){
    case $string[$pos]==='=':
        $mode = 'value';
        break;
    case $string[$pos]===",":
        $store[$key]=trim($value,"'");
        $key=$value='';
        $mode = 'key';
        break;
    default:
        $$mode .= $string[$pos];
  }

  $pos++;
}
        $store[$key]=trim($value,"'");