PHP regex groups captures

Question

I have the following regex:

\\[([^ -\\]]+)( - ([^ -\\]]+))+\\]

This match the following successfully:

[abc - def - ghi - jk         


        

Answer 1

SPL preg_match_all will return regex groups starting on index 1 of the $matches variable. If you want to get only the second group you can use $matches[2] for example.

Syntax:

$matches = array(); 
preg_match_all(\
    '/(He)\w+ (\w+)/', 
    "Hello world\n Hello Sunshine", 
    $matches
); 
var_dump($matches);

Result:

array(3) {
  [0] =>
  array(2) {
    [0] =>
    string(11) "Hello world"
    [1] =>
    string(14) "Hello Sunshine"
  }
  [1] =>
  array(2) {
    [0] =>
    string(2) "He"
    [1] =>
    string(2) "He"
  }
  [2] =>
  array(2) {
    [0] =>
    string(5) "world"
    [1] =>
    string(8) "Sunshine"
  }
}

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P.S. This answer is posted for the context of the question title after being directed here by a Google search. This was the information I was interested in when searching for this topic.