PHP Regular Expressions Preventing Parentheses from Capturing Text

PHP Regular Expressions

Preventing Parentheses from Capturing Text

Problem

You’ve used parentheses for grouping in a pattern, but you don’t want the text that matches what’s in the parentheses to show up in your array of captured matches.

Solution

Example  Preventing text capture

       $html = '<link rel="icon" href="http://www.example.com/icon.gif"/>

       <link rel="prev" href="http://www.example.com/prev.xml"/>

       <link rel="next" href="http://www.example.com/next.xml"/>';

       preg_match_all('/rel="(prev|next)" href="([^"]*?)"/', $html, $bothMatches);

       preg_match_all('/rel="(?:prev|next)" href="([^"]*?)"/', $html, $linkMatches);

       print '$bothMatches is: '; var_dump($bothMatches);

       print '$linkMatches is: '; var_dump($linkMatches);

In $bothMatches contains the values of the rel and the href attributes. $linkMatches, however, just contains the values of the href attributes. The code prints:

       $bothMatches is: array(3) {

            [0]=>

            array(2) {

                 [0]=>

                 string(49) "rel="prev" href="http://www.example.com/prev.xml""

                 [1]=>

                 string(49) "rel="next" href="http://www.example.com/next.xml""

            }

            [1]=>

            array(2) {

                 [0]=>

                 string(4) "prev"

                 [1]=>

                 string(4) "next"

            }

            [2]=>

            array(2) {

                 [0]=>

                 string(31) "http://www.example.com/prev.xml"

                 [1]=>

                 string(31) "http://www.example.com/next.xml"

            }

       }

       $linkMatches is: array(2) {

            [0]=>

            array(2) {

                 [0]=>

                 string(49) "rel="prev" href="http://www.example.com/prev.xml""

                 [1]=>

                 string(49) "rel="next" href="http://www.example.com/next.xml""

            }

            [1]=>

            array(2) {

                 [0]=>

                 string(31) "http://www.example.com/prev.xml"

                 [1]=>

                 string(31) "http://www.example.com/next.xml"

            }

       }

Discussion

Preventing capturing is particularly useful when a subpattern is optional. Because it might not show up in the array of captured text, an optional subpattern can change the number of pieces of captured text. This makes it hard to reference a particular matched piece of text at a given index. Making optional subpatterns noncapturing prevents this problem.

Example  A noncapturing optional subpattern

       $html = '<link rel="icon" href="http://www.example.com/icon.gif"/>

       <link rel="prev" title="Previous" href="http://www.example.com/prev.xml"/>

       <link rel="next" href="http://www.example.com/next.xml"/>';

       preg_match_all('/rel="(?:prev|next)"(?: title="[^"]+?")? href="([^"]*?)"/',

                                     $html, $linkMatches);

       

       print '$bothMatches is: '; var_dump($linkMatches);