Most reliable way to extract strings between two delimiters - php

Question

I've tried multiple functions to extract whatever between two strings, The delimiters might contain special characters, I guess that's why none worked for me.
My current function:
function between($str, $startTag, $endTag){
$delimiter = '#';
$regex = $delimiter . preg_quote($startTag, $delimiter)
. '(.*?)'
. preg_quote($endTag, $delimiter)
. $delimiter
. 's';
preg_match($regex, $str, $matches);
return $matches;
}
Example of string:
#{ST#RT}#
Text i want
#{END}#
#{ST#RT}#
Second text i want
#{END}#
How to improve that or suggest another solution to:
Support any kind of character or new lines
Extract multiple strings if found
Current Behavior: Only returns the first match, And also returns the match plus the surrounding tags which is unwanted

Answer 1

Use the m option for multi-line regular expressions (it allows the . character to match newlines):
preg_match('/foo.+bar/m', $str);
// ^--- this
Use preg_match_all() to get your multiple strings:
preg_match_all($regex, $str, $matches);
return $matches[1]; // an array of the strings
Edit:
The reason your current code returns the match plus the surrounding tags is because you're using return $matches. The $matches array has several elements in it. Index 0 is always the entire string that matched the expression. Indexes 1 and higher are your capture groups. In your expression, you had only one capture group (the "string"), so you would have wanted to only do return $matches[1] instead of return $matches.

Answer 2

You can use preg_match_all to extract multiple strings, besides that your code seems simple enough, normally simpler is faster.