PHP Regular Expression Exercises: Extract text (within parenthesis) from a string

Last update on May 31 2025 12:56:42 (UTC/GMT +8 hours)

6. Extract text (within parenthesis) from a string

Write a PHP script to extract text (within parenthesis) from a string.

Sample strings : 'The quick brown [fox].'

Visual Presentation:

PHP Regular Expression Exercise: Extract text (within parenthesis) from a string

Sample Solution:

PHP Code:

<?php
// Define the input text
$my_text = 'The quick brown [fox].';

// Use preg_match to find the substring enclosed in square brackets
preg_match('#\[(.*?)\]#', $my_text, $match);

// Print the matched substring captured within the square brackets
print $match[1]."\n";
?>

Output:

fox

Explanation:

In the exercise above,

<?php: PHP opening tag.
$my_text = 'The quick brown [fox].';: Assigns a string containing square brackets to the variable $my_text.
preg_match('#\[(.*?)\]#', $my_text, $match);: Uses a regular expression pattern to match text enclosed within square brackets. The "preg_match()" function searches for this pattern in '$my_text' and stores the result in the '$match' array.
print $match[1]."\n";: Prints the matched substring captured within the square brackets.

Flowchart :

For more Practice: Solve these Related Problems:

Write a PHP script to extract text from multiple sets of parentheses within a string and return them as an array.
Write a PHP function that extracts only the outermost set of parenthesis content, ignoring any nested ones.
Write a PHP function to extract and count words within parentheses, ignoring other parts of the string.
Write a PHP program to extract all unique substrings enclosed within parentheses from a complex multiline string.

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PHP Code Editor:

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