How to get a substring between two strings in PHP?

Answer 1

function getBetween($string, $start = "", $end = ""){
    if (strpos($string, $start)) { // required if $start not exist in $string
        $startCharCount = strpos($string, $start) + strlen($start);
        $firstSubStr = substr($string, $startCharCount, strlen($string));
        $endCharCount = strpos($firstSubStr, $end);
        if ($endCharCount == 0) {
            $endCharCount = strlen($firstSubStr);
        }
        return substr($firstSubStr, 0, $endCharCount);
    } else {
        return '';
    }
}

Sample use:

echo getBetween("abc","a","c"); // returns: 'b'

echo getBetween("hello","h","o"); // returns: 'ell'

echo getBetween("World","a","r"); // returns: ''

Answer 2

Use:

function getdatabetween($string, $start, $end){
    $sp = strpos($string, $start)+strlen($start);
    $ep = strpos($string, $end)-strlen($start);
    $data = trim(substr($string, $sp, $ep));
    return trim($data);
}
$dt = "Find string between two strings in PHP";
echo getdatabetween($dt, 'Find', 'in PHP');

Answer 3

I have to add something to the post of Julius Tilvikas. I looked for a solution like this one he described in his post. But i think there is a mistake. I don't get realy the string between two string, i also get more with this solution, because i have to substract the lenght of the start-string. When do this, i realy get the String between two strings.

Here are my changes of his solution:

function get_string_between ($string, $start, $end, $inclusive = false){
    $string = " ".$string;

    if ($start == "") { $ini = 0; }
    else { $ini = strpos($string, $start); }

    if ($end == "") { $len = strlen($string); }
    else { $len = strpos($string, $end, $ini) - $ini - strlen($start);}

    if (!$inclusive) { $ini += strlen($start); }
    else { $len += strlen($end); }

    return substr($string, $ini, $len);
}

Greetz

V

Answer 4

Regular expressions is the way to go:

$str = 'before-str-after';
if (preg_match('/before-(.*?)-after/', $str, $match) == 1) {
    echo $match[1];
}

onlinePhp

Answer 5

function getInbetweenStrings($start, $end, $str){
    $matches = array();
    $regex = "/$start([a-zA-Z0-9_]*)$end/";
    preg_match_all($regex, $str, $matches);
    return $matches[1];
}

for examle you want the array of strings(keys) between @@ in following example, where '/' doesn't fall in-between

$str = "C://@@ad_custom_attr1@@/@@upn@@/@@samaccountname@@";
$str_arr = getInbetweenStrings('@@', '@@', $str);

print_r($str_arr);

Answer 6

I like the regular expression solutions but none of the others suit me.

If you know there is only gonna be 1 result you can use the following:

$between = preg_replace('/(.*)BEFORE(.*)AFTER(.*)/sm', '\2', $string);

Change BEFORE and AFTER to the desired delimiters.

Also keep in mind this function will return the whole string in case nothing matched.

This solution is multiline but you can play with the modifiers depending on your needs.