Having problems splitting a long string with preg_match_all - php

Question

I have a variable (text) and it is updated with sentences every time there is an update. When i display this array it turns into 1 long sentence, and i want to break this up in single sentences for readability.
<?php
$pattern = '~\\d+-\\d+-\\d{4} // \\w+: ~ ';
$subject = '01-02-2015 // john: info text goes here 10-12-2015 // peter: some more info
';
$matches = array();
$result = preg_match_all ($pattern, $subject, $matches);
?>
Which gives this output:
$matches:
array (
0 =>
array (
0 => '01-02-2015 // john: ',
1 => '10-12-2015 // peter: ',
),
)
I'd like the output to be:
$matches:
array (
0 =>
array (
0 => '01-02-2015 // john: info text goes here',
1 => '10-12-2015 // peter: some more info',
),
)
I need the output to be like this so i can use a foreach loop to print each sentence.
ps. I'd like to try to get it to work this way first, because otherwise i'd need to change a lot of entries in the database.
pps. I'm also not a hero with regex as you can see, so i hope someone can help me out!

Answer 1

Just change your regex like below,
$pattern = '~\d+-\d+-\d{4} // \w+: .*?(?=\s\d+|$)~';
.*? will do a non-greedy match of zero or more characters until a space followed by digits or end of the line is reached.
DEMO
$str = "01-02-2015 // john: info text goes here 10-12-2015 // peter: some more info";
preg_match_all('~\d+-\d+-\d{4} // \w+: .*?(?=\s\d+|$)~', $str, $matches);
print_r($matches);
Output:
Array
(
[0] => Array
(
[0] => 01-02-2015 // john: info text goes here
[1] => 10-12-2015 // peter: some more info
)
)