Get some text from a string (regular expression)

Question

I have a string like:

Lorem Ipsum Dolor Sir 2013-10-22 Lorem Ipsum Dolor...

How should I take the date? I only want the portion of the text that determine the date ( yyyy-mm-dd ). I tried preg_match and was unable to only get that portion of the text.

Answer 1

preg_match('/(\d{4}-\d{2}-\d{2})/', $text, $matches);
echo $matches[1];

\d - any digit
{4} require 4 of the previous match
\d{4}   - require 4 digits

Answer 2

Matches inside parenthesis are put in the third argument of preg_match , so that the first item in it is the whole match and the next are matches inside parenthesis.

preg_match("/(\d{4}-\d{2}-\d{2})/", $text, $regs);
echo $regs[0]; // The whole match is in $regs[0]
echo $regs[1]; // The match inside the 1. parenthesis is in $regs[1]

Answer 3

You can use this regex:

$str = 'Lorem Ipsum Dolor Sir 2013-10-22 Lorem Ipsum Dolor...';
if (preg_match('/(\d{4}-\d{2}-\d{2})/', $str, $match))
   echo $match[1] . "\n";