Regex for single letter with dot after and stuff around? php

Question

I have the following being stored in a variable

>a.<

>b.<

>c.<

but there's a bunch of other stuff around it, what regex would I use to match

>(.*).<

where (.*) is any single letter?

Answer 1

Try using this regular expression: \\>([a-zA-Z])\\.\\<

The dot is a control character that must be escaped. The [] specifies a range for a single character.

EDIT:

These characters needs to be escaped: . \\ + * ? [ ^ ] $ ( ) { } = ! < > | : - . \\ + * ? [ ^ ] $ ( ) { } = ! < > | : - . \\ + * ? [ ^ ] $ ( ) { } = ! < > | : - according to http://php.net/manual/en/function.preg-quote.php . I have updated my answer to reflect that.

Answer 2

You can also try this pattern:

>[^\.]+\.<

Independent of any specific character (other than last dot), just in the same way as yours.