Nested pattern matching with preg_match_all (Regex and PHP) - php

Question

I'm working with text data that contains special flags in the form of "{X}" or "{XX}" where X could be any alphanumeric character. Special meaning is assigned to these flags when they are adjacent or when they are separated. I need a regex which will match adjacent flags AND separate each flag in the group.
For Example, given the following input:
{B}{R}: Target player loses 1 life.
{W}{G}{U}: Target player gains 5 life.
The output should be approximate:
("{B}{R}",
"{W}{G}{U}")
("{B}",
"{R}")
("{W}",
"{G}",
"{U}")
My PHP code is returning the adjacents array properly, but the split array contains only the last matching flag in each group:
$input = '{B}{R}: Target player loses 1 life.
{W}{G}{U}: Target player gains 5 life.';
$pattern = '#((\{[a-zA-Z0-9]{1,2}})+)#';
preg_match_all($pattern, $input, $results);
print_r($results);
Output:
Array
(
[0] => Array
(
[0] => {B}{R}
[1] => {W}{G}{U}
)
[1] => Array
(
[0] => {B}{R}
[1] => {W}{G}{U}
)
[2] => Array
(
[0] => {R}
[1] => {U}
)
)
Thanks for any help!

Answer 1

unset($results[1]);
foreach($results[0] AS $match){
preg_match_all('/\{[a-zA-Z0-9]{1,2}}/', $match, $r);
$results[] = $r[0];
}
That's the only way I know of to create your Required datastructure. Though, a preg_split would work as well:
unset($results[1]);
foreach($results[0] AS $match)
$results[] = preg_split('/(?<=})(?=\{)/', $match);