[SOLVED] Regex matches help

[Goose]

I know there are resources on Google and here on this site for this topic, but I don't know what it is actually called so I don't know what to search for. So hopefully some of you smart people can help me out.

 

I am doing a regular expressions search and I want to find a bbcode like tag. There is only one tag and its opening tag looks like [ail] and its closing tag looks like [/ail]. I want to replace the opening and closing tags and have been doing that easily  with str_replace() but now I need to do more than replace text. I want to grab the text inside the tags with a regular expression.

 

So, how do I match this pattern [ail]inside_text[/ail] and store the inside_text into a variable?

 

Thanks!

[Henaro]

You mean BBcode?

Can I refer you to this post?

http://www.phpfreaks.com/forums/index.php/topic,145449.0.html

[Goose]

That does help ... but the thing that I would like to know how to do is take the regex result $1 and save it to php variable that I can use outside the regex.

[Wildbug]

If you don't want to replace anything, use preg_match_all().  The parenthetical expressions will be captured in an array.

[Goose]

I am doing this now by using the preg_match function first and then replacing the matches later using preg_replace. Seems to work fine.

[Goose]

I was writing my reply as you were submitting yours Wildbug, thanks for the tips though!