Extract text between two characters

Question

How can I best trim the following text outside the braces:

$myString = "10:0{ 'name':'John', 'age':30, 'car':null }24:0";

The text outside of the braces 10:0 and 24:0 may vary.

I'm not exactly sure, but it looks like a serialized (http://php.net/manual/en/function.unserialize.php) string. — Dan, May 23 '18 at 20:26
@Spingolini: JSON, at least after you do what OP wants to do. — AbraCadaver, May 23 '18 at 20:27
Sorry, you're right. The numbers at the beginning distracted me for a second. — Dan, May 23 '18 at 20:28
Possible duplicate of [Matching text between braces in PHP](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4864328/matching-text-between-braces-in-php) — Nigel Ren, May 23 '18 at 20:48
Yeah well spotted Alex... The quotes between the braces are actually single quotes ' . — iancarp, May 24 '18 at 21:24

score 1 · Answer 1 · answered May 23 '18 at 20:26

1

You can trim numbers and colons off with:

trim($myString, '0123456789:');

... or you could replace everything outside the braces:

preg_replace('/.*?(\{.*?\}).*/', '$1', $myString);

answered May 23 '18 at 20:26

user3783243

score 0 · Accepted Answer · answered May 23 '18 at 20:25

0

Just grab what's inside the braces:

preg_match('/{[^}]+}/', $myString, $match);
echo $match[0];

answered May 23 '18 at 20:25

AbraCadaver

2 Answers2