coffear

it is just the name they gave to the array which can be anything containing a-z A-Z 0-9 _ as long as it starts with a letter. The content of the var seems to be an associative array of a row taken from the database.

yes as alpine states, take it out of the foreach loop. I only kept it in there to show it worked with al of your examples.

The following works:- <?PHP $text = array('a:1:{i:4;c:7;s:23:"fdgrtgr";}', 'a:1:{i:4;s:78:"ertertferf";}', 'a:1:{i:4;s:56:"sdferetrr";}', 'a:1:{i:8;s:22:"aajoimk";}', 'a:1:{i:4;s:19:"sdfasjk";}', 'a:1:{i:6;s:7:"cwam";}', 'a:1:{i:4;s:4:"serwerwer";}', 'a:1:{i:4;s:55:"rty56yr";}', 'a:1:{i:4;s:7:"easdsdas";}', 'a:1:{i:4;s:44:"jghjjh";}', 'a:1:{i:4;s:2;h:9::"erwer";}', 'a:1:{i:4;s:71:"gftyrt";}', 'a:1:{i:4;s:16:"ghjhj";});'); foreach ($text as $data) { preg_match('/(?:")([\w\d]+)(?:")/',$data,$match); echo "$match[1]\n"; } ?>

presumably you have remembered to restart apache after making the changes?