Get values from formatted, delimited string with quoted labels and values

Question

I have an input string like this:

"Day":June 8-10-2012,"Location":US,"City":Newyork

I need to match 3 value substrings:

June 8-10-2012

US

Newyork

I don't need the labels.

Answer 1

Per my comment above, if this is JSON, you should definitely use those functions as they are more suited for this.

However, you can use the following REGEX.

/:([a-zA-Z0-9\\s-]*)/g

<?php
preg_match('/:([a-zA-Z0-9\s-]*)/', '"Day":June 8-10-2012,"Location":US,"City":Newyork', $matches);
print_r($matches);

The regex demo is here:

https://regex101.com/r/BbwVQ5/1

Answer 2

Here are a couple of simple ways:

Code: ( Demo )

$string = '"Day":June 8-10-2012,"Location":US,"City":Newyork';

var_export(preg_match_all('/:\K[^,]+/', $string, $out) ? $out[0] : 'fail');

echo "\n\n";

var_export(preg_split('/,?"[^"]+":/', $string, 0, PREG_SPLIT_NO_EMPTY));

Output:

array (
  0 => 'June 8-10-2012',
  1 => 'US',
  2 => 'Newyork',
)

array (
  0 => 'June 8-10-2012',
  1 => 'US',
  2 => 'Newyork',
)

Pattern #1 Demo \\K restarts the match after : so that a positive lookbehind can be avoided (saving "steps" / improving pattern efficiency) By matching all following characters that are not a comma, a capture group can be avoided (saving "steps" / improving pattern efficiency).

Patter #2 Demo ,? makes the comma optional and qualifies the leading double-quoted "key" to be matched (split on). The targeted substring to split on will match the full "key" substring and end on the following : colon.