Regex, get string value between two characters

Question

I'd like to return string between two characters, @ and dot (.).

(@(.*?).)

Answer 1

Your regular expression almost works, you just forgot to escape the period. Also, in PHP you need delimiters:

'/@(.*?)\./s'

The s is the DOTALL modifier .

Here's a complete example of how you could use it in PHP:

$s = 'foo@bar.baz';
$matches = array();
$t = preg_match('/@(.*?)\./s', $s, $matches);
print_r($matches[1]);

Output:

bar

Answer 2

Try this regular expression:

@([^.]*)\.

The expression [^.]* will match any number of any character other than the dot. And the plain dot needs to be escaped as it's a special character.

Answer 3

this is the best and fast to use

function get_string_between ($str,$from,$to) {

    $string = substr($str, strpos($str, $from) + strlen($from));

    if (strstr ($string,$to,TRUE) != FALSE) {

        $string = strstr ($string,$to,TRUE);

    }

    return $string;

}

Answer 4

If you're learning regex, you may want to analyse those too:

@\K[^.]++(?=\.)

(?<=@)[^.]++(?=\.)

Both these regular expressions use possessive quantifiers ( ++ ). Use them whenever you can, to prevent needless backtracking. Also, by using lookaround constructions (or \\K ), we can match the part between the @ and the . in $matches[0] .