Having trouble with this regular expression in PHP

Question

I'm trying to run regular expression on the following string with PHP using preg_match_all function

"{{content 1}}{{content 2}}"

The result I'm looking for is array with 2 matches inside {{ and }}

Here is the expression '/\{\{(.+)\}\}/'

I'm suspecting that my expression is too greedy but how to make it less greedy?

Answer 1

You can use the ungreedy modifier ?, like so:

$regex = '/\{\{.*?\}\}/';

New regex will output:

Array
(
    [0] => Array
        (
            [0] => {{content 1}}
            [1] => {{content 2}}
        )

)

---

EDIT:

Just remembered another way to do this. You can just add a U (capital u) in the end of your regex string and result will be the same, like so:

$regex = '/\{\{.+\}\}/U';

Also, here is a useful list of regex modifiers.

Answer 2

You can also use the U PCRE modifier (Ungreedy)

Answer 3

Is the regular expression string in a single quote or double quote PHP string? Because if it's in a double quoted string, curly braces include variables so need to be escaped twice.

"/\\{\\{(.+)\\}\\}/"