PHP regex match last occurrences of the pattern matching

Question

I know there is a negative lookahead regex that can match last occurrences of the string.

Example: replace last occurrences of string

I want to do something like

Answer 1

You want to use a negated character class here instead of .*?.

The .* inside of your lookahead assertion will match all the way up to the last occurrence of (...) then backtrack consecutively keeping the succession order going.

preg_replace('/\([^)]*\)(?!.*\([^)]*\))/', '', $string);

To simplify this task, just retain everything up until the last occurrence instead.

preg_replace('/.*\K\(.*?\)/', '', $string);

Answer 2

Youre mistake is using \(.*\) it's replace full substring which begins whith ( and ends whith ). .* - max quantificator, (.*) - min quantificator.

Try to use:

$string = 'hello example (a) hello example (b) (c)'; echo preg_replace('/\((.*)\)$/', '', $string);