Is there a regular expression for excluding delineated text, i.e. anything that falls between two symbols? I can get it to work when I want to include only things only between the two symbol (for example, quotes):
$str = 'Here is the text, "text!", I want to format.'
echo preg_replace( "/(?<=[\"])[^\"]*(?=[\"])/", "?", $str );
yielding:
Here is the text, "?", I want to format.
But I can't figure out the opposite — to have the regex engine ignore whatever is in between the quotes, parentheses, braces, etc. Theoretically, such a solution would yield:
? "text!" ?
There are a lot of case-by-case answers out there, but I can't find a generalized solution that I can apply to different situations when I want to do a regex search that excludes a block of text.
CodePudding user response：
Use a capture group to match the part you want to keep in the result.
preg_replace('/.*?("[^"]*").*/', '? $1 ?', $str);
CodePudding user response：
Maybe try something like
("[^"]*")(*SKIP)(*F)|(?:(?!(?1)).)
| regex | note |
|---|---|
("[^"]*") |
catches anything enclosed in quotes, and put in group 1 |
...(*SKIP)(*F)| |
patterns you want to avoid, in this case is the rule that defined in group 1 |
(?:(?!(?1)).) |
match any string that does not contain a substring that matches the rule in group 1 |
Check the test case here
Also, you are able to replace any pattern in group 1 to filter out any pattern you want, such as