I'd like to return string between two characters, @ and dot (.).
I tried to use regex but cannot find it working.
(@(.*?).)
Anybody?
4 Answers
Your regular expression almost works, you just forgot to escape the period. Also, in PHP you need delimiters:
'/@(.*?)\./s'
The s is the DOTALL modifier.
Here's a complete example of how you could use it in PHP:
$s = 'foo@bar.baz';
$matches = array();
$t = preg_match('/@(.*?)\./s', $s, $matches);
print_r($matches[1]);
Output:
bar
Try this regular expression:
@([^.]*)\.
The expression [^.]* will match any number of any character other than the dot. And the plain dot needs to be escaped as it’s a special character.
If you're learning regex, you may want to analyse those too:
@\K[^.]++(?=\.)
(?<=@)[^.]++(?=\.)
Both these regular expressions use possessive quantifiers (++). Use them whenever you can, to prevent needless backtracking. Also, by using lookaround constructions (or \K), we can match the part between the @ and the . in $matches[0].
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