Finding multiple regular expression matches in one line

Question

As for practice and later development, i'm working on a PHP router. For this router, my mapped routes could have parameters in them, a route looks like this:

/home/{i:pageNum}/{s:userName}

There are now 2 variables in this route:

• The pageNum variable, which is an int type
• The userName variable, which is an string type

For capturing this data, i wrote this regular expression:

{((?<type>\D):)?(?<name>[a-zA-Z_-ÿ][a-zA-Z0-9_-ÿ]+)}

This works great, but the only problem with it is that it only captures the first variable only.

It does only capture more of these matches when I put a new route on a new line.

I tried capturing the whole regular expression by surrounding it by ( 's and ) 's. This did not work.

How can I make this regular expression so that it captures more matches on one line of text?

For calling this regular expression, I use the following PHP function:

preg_match("/{((?<type>\D):)?(?<name>[a-zA-Z_-ÿ][a-zA-Z0-9_-ÿ]+)}/", "/home/{i:pageNum}/{s:userName}", $matches);

Answer 1

Just use preg_match_all() and PREG_SET_ORDER :

preg_match_all("/{((?<type>\D):)?(?<name>[a-zA-Z_-ÿ][a-zA-Z0-9_-ÿ]+)}/",
               "/home/{i:pageNum}/{s:userName}",
               $matches,
               PREG_SET_ORDER);

Then:

foreach($matches as $match) {
    echo $match['name'] . ' = ' . $match['type'];
}

Using the default PREG_PATTERN_ORDER you could do:

$matches = array_combine($matches['name'], $matches['type']);

foreach($matches as $name => $type) {
    echo "$name = $type";
}