Regular Expression Help Needed - Advanced Search and Replace

Question

I have a string like

"'Joe'&@[Uk Customers.First Name](contact:16[[---]]first_name) +@[Uk Customers.Last Name](contact:16[[---]]last_name)"

My requirement is start finding the pattern

@[A.B](contact:**digit**[[---]]**field**)

There can be many pattern in single string.

and replace it with a new string (entire pattern should be replaced) with a dynamic text generated by digit and field value

For an example for above string there are two matches

1st match is : array( digit => 16, field =>first_name)

2nd match is : array( digit => 16, field =>last_name)

and somewhere I have few rules which are

if digit is 16 and field is first_name replace pattern with "John" if digit is 16 and field is last_name replace pattern with "Doe"

so the output string will be "'Joe'&John+Doe"

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

The matching part is fairly straightforward. This will do the trick:

@\[[^.]+\.[^.]+\]\(contact:(\d+)\[\[---\]\]([^)]+)\)

Debuggex Demo

Regex101 Demo

In PHP (and other languages that support named capture groups), you can do this to get the array to contain keys "digit" and "field":

@\[[^.]+\.[^.]+\]\(contact:(?<digit>\d+)\[\[---\]\](?<field>[^)]+)\)

Example PHP code:

$regex = '/@\[[^.]+\.[^.]+\]\(contact:(?<digit>\d+)\[\[---\]\](?<field>[^)]+)\)/';
$text = '"\'Joe\'&@[Uk Customers.First Name](contact:16[[---]]first_name) +@[Uk Customers.Last Name](contact:16[[---]]last_name)"';


preg_match_all($regex, $text, $matches, PREG_SET_ORDER);

var_dump($matches);

Result:

array(2) {
  [0]=>
  array(5) {
    [0]=>
    string(55) "@[Uk Customers.First Name](contact:16[[---]]first_name)"
    ["digit"]=>
    string(2) "16"
    [1]=>
    string(2) "16"
    ["field"]=>
    string(10) "first_name"
    [2]=>
    string(10) "first_name"
  }
  [1]=>
  array(5) {
    [0]=>
    string(53) "@[Uk Customers.Last Name](contact:16[[---]]last_name)"
    ["digit"]=>
    string(2) "16"
    [1]=>
    string(2) "16"
    ["field"]=>
    string(9) "last_name"
    [2]=>
    string(9) "last_name"
  }
}

I'm not real clear on the logic you want to use for the replacement, so I'm afraid I can't help there without some clarification.