This post originated from an RSS feed registered with PHP Buzz by Tobias Schlitt. Original Post: Regex guru needed Feed Title: Tobias Schlitt - Weblog Feed URL: http://php-applications.de/lists/listinfo/phpug-dortmundlists/listinfo/phpug-dortmundlists/listinfo/phpug-dortmundlists/listinfo/phpug-dortmundlists/listinfo/phpug-dortmundlists/listinfo/phpug-dortmundlists/listinfo/phpug-dortmundlists/listinfo/phpug-dortmundlists/listinfo/phpug-dortmundlists/listinfo/phpug-dortmundlists/listinfo/phpug-dortmundlists/listinfo/phpug-dortmundlists/listinfo/phpug-dortmundlists/listinfo/phpug-dortmundapplications/blog/rss.php?category=2_PHP&version=0.91 Feed Description: a passion for php Latest PHP Buzz Posts Latest PHP Buzz Posts by Tobias Schlitt Latest Posts From Tobias Schlitt - Weblog

I recently wanted to extract all function/method prototypes from a PHP files, using PCRE. The extraction itself is not a real problem, but for further processing I need every single parameter of each function as a seperate element. Surely it would be no problem, when using 2 regex (a. extract the function prototype, b. extract the parameters), but this would (IMHO) be much more resource intensive than doing all at once.

Here is a (much smaller than the real one) example which describes the problem (see the extended entry for the real regex I developed):

<?php
$string = "(aaa bbb ccc ddd)";
$regex = "/\((?:
                ([a-z]+)\s*
             )+\)/x";
preg_match($regex, $string, $matches);
?>

The output of a var_dump($matches) looks like this:

array(2) {
  [0]=>
  string(17) "(aaa bbb ccc ddd)"
  [1]=>
  string(3) "ddd"
}

Where I would expect something like

array(5) {
  [0]=>
  string(17) "(aaa bbb ccc ddd)"
  [1]=>
  string(3) "aaa"
  [2]=>
  string(3) "bbb"
  [3]=>
  string(3) "ccc"
  [4]=>
  string(3) "ddd"
}

or

array(2) {
  [0]=>
  string(17) "(aaa bbb ccc ddd)"
  [1]=> 
  array(4) {
     [0]=>
     string(3) "aaa"
     [1]=>
     string(3) "bbb"
     [2]=>
     string(3) "ccc"
     [3]=>
     string(3) "ddd"
   }
}

Does anyone know a solution for that (I repeate, in 1 regular expression)?