PHP: Best way to extract text within parenthesis?

Question

What\'s the best/most efficient way to extract text set between parenthesis? Say I wanted to get the string \"text\" from the string \"ignore everything except this (text)\"

Answer 1

So, actually, the code you posted doesn't work: substr()'s parameters are $string, $start and $length, and strpos()'s parameters are $haystack, $needle. Slightly modified:

$str = "ignore everything except this (text)";
$start  = strpos($str, '(');
$end    = strpos($str, ')', $start + 1);
$length = $end - $start;
$result = substr($str, $start + 1, $length - 1);

Some subtleties: I used $start + 1 in the offset parameter in order to help PHP out while doing the strpos() search on the second parenthesis; we increment $start one and reduce $length to exclude the parentheses from the match.

Also, there's no error checking in this code: you'll want to make sure $start and $end do not === false before performing the substr.

As for using strpos/substr versus regex; performance-wise, this code will beat a regular expression hands down. It's a little wordier though. I eat and breathe strpos/substr, so I don't mind this too much, but someone else may prefer the compactness of a regex.

Answer 2

This is a sample code to extract all the text between '[' and ']' and store it 2 separate arrays(ie text inside parentheses in one array and text outside parentheses in another array)

   function extract_text($string)
   {
    $text_outside=array();
    $text_inside=array();
    $t="";
    for($i=0;$i<strlen($string);$i++)
    {
        if($string[$i]=='[')
        {
            $text_outside[]=$t;
            $t="";
            $t1="";
            $i++;
            while($string[$i]!=']')
            {
                $t1.=$string[$i];
                $i++;
            }
            $text_inside[] = $t1;

        }
        else {
            if($string[$i]!=']')
            $t.=$string[$i];
            else {
                continue;
            }

        }
    }
    if($t!="")
    $text_outside[]=$t;

    var_dump($text_outside);
    echo "\n\n";
    var_dump($text_inside);
  }

Output: extract_text("hello how are you?"); will produce:

array(1) {
  [0]=>
  string(18) "hello how are you?"
}

array(0) {
}

extract_text("hello [http://www.google.com/test.mp3] how are you?"); will produce

array(2) {
  [0]=>
  string(6) "hello "
  [1]=>
  string(13) " how are you?"
}


array(1) {
  [0]=>
  string(30) "http://www.google.com/test.mp3"
}