regular expression in php: take the shortest match

Question

I'm trying to do a PHP regular expression but i can't find the right way ...

Imagine I have this string: "hello, my {{name is Peter}} and {{I want to eat chocolate}}"

I want to take the parts between {{ and }}

But if I use preg_match("/\{\{(.*)?\}\}/", $string)

it returns me jut one string "{{name is Peter}} and {{I want to eat chocolate}}"

How can I tell to take the first coincidences of }} ?

Thank you

Answer 1

Use

"/{{(.*?)}}/"

The expression ".*" is greedy, taking as many characters as possible. If you use ".*?" is takes as little characters as possible, that is it stops at the first set of closing brackets.

Answer 2

The PCRE functions a greedy by default. That means, that the engine always tries to match as much characters as possible. The solution is simple: Just tell him to act non-greedy with the U modifier

/{{(.+)}}/U

http://php.net/reference.pcre.pattern.modifiers