Get content between two strings PHP

user_123140 0
Viewed 75529

Whats is the best way to obtain the content between two strings e.g.

ob_start();
include('externalfile.html'); ## see below
$out = ob_get_contents();
ob_end_clean();

preg_match('/{FINDME}(.|\n*)+{\/FINDME}/',$out,$matches);
$match = $matches[0];

echo $match;

## I have used .|\n* as it needs to check for new lines. Is this correct?

## externalfile.html

{FINDME}
Text Here
{/FINDME}

For some reason this appears to work on one place in my code and not another. Am I going about this in the right way? Or is there a better way?

Also is output buffer the way to do this or file_get_contents?

Thanks in advance!

file-get-contents output-buffering php regex
7 Answers

I like to avoid using regex if possible, here is alternative solution to fetch all strings between two strings and returns an array.

function getBetween($content, $start, $end) {
    $n = explode($start, $content);
    $result = Array();
    foreach ($n as $val) {
        $pos = strpos($val, $end);
        if ($pos !== false) {
            $result[] = substr($val, 0, $pos);
        }
    }
    return $result;
}
print_r(getBetween("The quick brown {{fox}} jumps over the lazy {{dog}}", "{{", "}}"));

Results :

Array
(
    [0] => fox
    [1] => dog
)
user_98950700
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