how to replace the full match with preg_replace?

Question

I have this regular expression:

As you can see it matches group 1 and group 2 from the given string.

But when I use preg_replace in php it replaces not group 2 of the full match:

preg_replace('/\[(\w+)[^\]]*]([^\[]+\[\\?\/\1\])?/', '', $string)

How can I replace the full match?

UPDATE:

In the tester regex101.com the regex works well indeed. But on a real PHP server it doesn't work as expected. See below:

Tested on 2 different servers with php7.2 with this method, but this is the result:

    public function TestReplace(){

    $string = 'x[embed]some text or url[/embed]x';

    return preg_replace('/\[(\w+)[^\]]*]([^\[]+\[\\?\/\1\])?/', '', $string);

}

returns:

xsome text or url[/embed]x

So it only replace [embed] on a real php7.2 server. I really don't know what I do wrong here...

It does replace. Look at here https://www.phpliveregex.com/p/vGo — unclexo, Apr 24 '20 at 08:18
well, here in this phpliveregex.com it does I see. But when I do exact the same in my application it doesn't replace group 2. Strange... — brasileric, Apr 24 '20 at 08:28
So, you need to remove the match, right? Did you assign the new value to the variable? `$string = preg_replace('/\[(\w+)[^\]]*]([^\[]+\[\\?\/\1\])?/', '', $string)`? — Wiktor Stribiżew, Apr 24 '20 at 08:30
yes, I did. Well thanks, I think I do something wrong somewhere. Will investigate further. — brasileric, Apr 24 '20 at 08:39
Then let's close as off-topic, there is no issue in the above code. — Wiktor Stribiżew, Apr 24 '20 at 08:39

score 0 · Accepted Answer · answered Apr 27 '20 at 09:30

I found the answer! It seems that php preg_replace does not support some regex functions, so I had to change the regex a bit.

This one works for php:

preg_replace('/\[\w+[^\]]*]([^\[]+\[[\\a-zA-Z\/]+\])?/', '', $string);

With thanks to this post: PHP preg_replace non-greedy trouble.

So my conclusion is also that this live testers like www.phpliveregex.com are not always reliable.

how to replace the full match with preg_replace?

1 Answers1