What does this Regular Expression do - php

$pee = preg_replace( '|<p>|', "$1<p>", $pee );
This regular expression is from the Wordpress source code (formatting.php, wpautop function); I'm not sure what it does, can anyone help?
Actually I'm trying to port this function to Python...if anyone knows of an existing port already, that would be much better as I'm really bad with regex.

The preg_replace() function - somewhat confusingly - allows you to use other delimiters besides the standard "/" for regular expressions, so
"|<p>|"
Would be a regular expression just matching
"<p>"
in the text. However, I'm not clear on what the replacement parameter of
"$1<p>"
would be doing, since there's no grouping to map to $1. It would seem like as given, this is just replacing a paragraph tag with an empty string followed by a paragraph tag, and in effect doing nothing.
Anyone with more in-depth knowledge of PHP quirks have a better analysis?

wordpress really calls a variable "pee" ?
I'm not sure what the $1 stands for (there are no braces in the first parameter?), so I don't think it actually does anything, but i could be wrong.

...?
Actually, it looks like this takes the first <p> tag and prepends the previous regular expression's first match to it (since there's no match in this one),
However, it seems that this behavior is bad to say the least, as there's no guarantee that preg_* functions won't clobber $1 with their own values.
Edit: Judging from Jay's comment, this regex actually does nothing.

The pipe symbols | in this case do not have the default meaning of "match this or that" but are use as alternative delimiters for the pattern instead of the more common slashes /. This may make sense, if you want to match for / without having to escape those appearances (e.g. /(.\*)\/(.\*)\// is not as readable as #/(.\*)/(.\*)/#). Seems quite contra productive to use | instead which is just another reserved char for patterns, though.
Normally $1 in the replacement pattern should match the first group denoted by parentheses. E.g if you've got a pattern like
"(.*)<p>"
$0 would contain the whole match and $1 the part before the <p>.
As the given reg-ex does not declare any groups and $1 is not a valid name for a variable (in PHP4) defined elsewhere, this call seems to replace any occurrences of <p> with <p>?
To be honest, now I'm also quite confused. Just a guess: gets another pattern-matching method (preg_match and the like) called before the given line so the $1 is "leaked" from there?

I highly recommend the amazing RegexBuddy

I believe that line does nothing.
For what it's worth, this is the previous line, in which $1 is set:
$pee = preg_replace('!<p>([^<]+)\s*?(</(?:div|address|form)[^>]*>)!', "<p>$1</p>$2", $pee);
However, I don't think that's worth anything. In my testing, $1 does not maintain a value from one preg_replace to the next, even if the next doesn't set its own value for $1. Remember that PHP variable names cannot begin with a number (see: http://php.net/language.variables ), so $1 is not a PHP variable. It only means something within a single preg_replace, and in this case the rules of preg_replace suggest it doesn't mean anything.
That said, autop being such a widely-used function makes me doubt my own conclusion that this line is doing nothing. So I look forward to someone correcting me.

The regex simply matches the literal text . The choice to delimit the regex with the vertical bar instead of forward slashes is very unfortunate. It doesn't change the code, but it makes it harder for humans to read. (It also makes it impossible to use the alternation operator in the regex.)
$1 is not a valid variable name in PHP, so $1 is never interpolated in double-quoted strings. The $1 gets passed to preg_replace unchanged. preg_replace parses the replacement string, and replaces $1 with the contents of the first capturing group. If there is no capturing group, $1 is replaced with nothing.
Thus, this code does the same as:
$pee = preg_replace( '/<p>/', "<p>", $pee );
It's not correct that this does nothing. The search-and-replace will run, slowing down your software, and eating up memory for temporary copies of $pee.

It replace the match from the pattern
"|<p>|"
by the string
"$1<p>"
The | in the replacement pattern is causes the regex engine to match either the part on the left side, or the part on the right side.
I do not get why it's used that way because usually it's for something like "ta(b|p)e"...
For the $1, I guess the variable $1 is in the PHP code and it replaced during the preg_replace so if $1 = "test"; the replacement will replace the
"<p>"
to
"test<p>"
But I am not sure of it for the $1

Related

PHP regex last occurrence of words

My string is: /var/www/domain.com/public_html/foo/bar/folder/another/..
I want to remove the root folder from this string, to get only public folder, because some servers have multiple websites inside.
My actual regex is: /^(.*?)(www|public_html|public|html)/s
My actual result is: /domain.com/public_html/foo/bar/folder/another/..
But i want to remove the last ocorrence, and get somethig like this: /foo/bar/folder/another/..
Thanks!
You have to use a greedy quantifier and to check if the alternative is enclosed between slashes using lookarounds:
/^.*(?<![^\/])(?:www|public(?:_html)?|html)(?![^\/])/
About the lookarounds: I use negative lookarounds with a negated character class to check if there is a slash or the limit of the string at the same time. This way you are sure that for instance html is a folder and not the part of another folder name.
I removed the s modifier that is useless. I removed the capture groups too since the goal is to replace all with an empty string.
The ? makes your expression non-greedy which is not actually what you want here. Try:
^(.*)(www|public_html|public|html)
which should keep going until the last match.
Demo: https://regex101.com/r/v5WbB3/1/

How to remove backpath/parentpath from the URL?

Input:
http://foo/bar/baz/../../qux/
Desired Output:
http://foo/qux/
This can be achieved using regular expression (unless someone can suggest a more efficient alternative).
If it was a forward look-up, it would be as simple as:
/\.\.\/[^\/]+/
Though I am not familiar with with how to make a backward look up for the first "/" (ie. not doing /[a-z0-9-_]+\/\.\./).
One of the solutions I thought of is to use strrev then apply forward look up regex (first example) and then do strrev. Though I am sure there is a more efficient way.
Not the clearest question I've ever seen, but if I understand what you're asking, I think you only need to switch around what you have like this:
/[^\/]+/\.\./
...then replace that with a /
Do that until no replacements are made and you should have what you want
EDIT
Your attempt seems to try to match a forward slash / and two dots \.\. followed by a slash / (or \/ - they should both match the same thing), then one or more non-slash characters[^/]+, terminated by a slash /. Flipping it around, you want to find a slash followed by one or more non-slash characters and a terminating slash, then two dots and a final slash.
You may be confused into thinking that the regex engine parses and consumes things as it goes (so you wouldn't want to consume a directory name that is not followed by the correct number of dots), but that's not how it typically works - a regex engine matches the entire expression before it replaces or returns anything. So, you can have two dots followed by a directory name, or a directory name followed by two dots - it doesn't make a difference to the engine.
If your attempt is using the slash-enclosed Perl-style syntax, then you would of course need to use \/ for any slashes you're trying to match such as the middle one, but I would also recommend matching and replacing the enclosing slashes in the url as well: I think the PHP would be something like
preg_replace('/\/[^\/]+\/\.\.\//', '/', $input)
(??)
Technically what do you want is replace segments of '/path1/path2/../../' by '/' what is needed to do that is match 'pathx/'^n'../'^n that is definetly NOT a regular expression (Context Free Lenguaje) ... but most of Regex libraries supports some non regular lenguajes and can (with a lot of effort) manage those kind of lenguajes.
An easy way to solve it is stay in Regular Expressions and cycle several times, replacing '/[^./]+/../' by ''
if you still to do it in a single step, Lookahead and grouping is needed, but it will be hard to write it, (I'm not so used on, but I will try)
EDIT:
I've found the solution in only 1 REGEX... but should use PCRE Regex
([^/.]+/(?1)?\.\./)
I've based my solution on the folowing link:
Match a^n b^n c^n (e.g. "aaabbbccc") using regular expressions (PCRE)
(note that dots are "forbidden" in the first section, you cannot have path.1/path.2/ if you whant to is quite more complex because you should admit them but forbid '../' as valid in the first section
this sub expression is for admiting the path names like 'path1/'
[^/.]+/
this sub expression is for admiting the double dots.
\.\./
you can test the regexp in
https://www.debuggex.com/
(remember to set it in PCRE mode)
Here is a working copy:
https://eval.in/52675

regex and preg_replace_callback

I have a problem with a regular expression.
I'm working with tokens and I have to parse a text like this:
Just some random text
#IT=AB|First statement# #xxxx=xxx|First statement|Second statement#
More text
I use preg_replace_callback since I have to use the first statement or the second one, depending on the first expression is true or not; it's a sort of IF...ELSE... statement.
What I expect are 2 elements like this:
#IT=AB|First statement#
#xxxx=xxx|First statement|Second statement#
So I can start manipulating them inside my callback function.
I tried with this regex /#.*#/, but i get the entire string, it's not parsed into elements.
How can I achieve that? I'm sorry but regex aren't my thing :(
The quantifier * is greedy by default. So a .* will match as much as it can and as a result it'll match a # as well. To fix this you can make the * non-greedy by adding a ? after it. Now a .*? will try to much as little as it can.
/#.*?#/
or you can look for only non # characters between two #:
/#[^#]*#/

Parse block with php regex

I'm trying to write a (I think) pretty simple RegEx with PHP but it's not working.
Basically I have a block defined like this:
%%%%blockname%%%%
stuff goes here
%%%%/blockname%%%%
I'm not any good at RegEx, but this is what I tried:
preg_match_all('/^%%%%(.*?)%%%%(.*?)%%%%\/(.*?)%%%%$/i',$input,$matches);
It returns an array with 4 empty entries.
I guess it also, apart from actually working, needs some sort of pointer for the third match because it should be equal to the first one?
Please enlighten me :)
You need to allow the dot to match newlines, and to allow ^ and $ to match at the start and end of lines (not just the entire string):
preg_match_all('/^%%%%(.*?)%%%%(.*?)%%%%\/(.*?)%%%%$/sm',$input,$matches);
The s (single-line) option makes the dot match any character including newlines.
The m (multi-line) option allows ^ and $ to match at the start and end of lines.
The i option is unnecessary in your regex since there are no case-sensitive characters in it.
Then, to answer the second part of your question: If blockname is the same in both cases, then you can make that explicit by using a backreference to the first capturing group:
preg_match_all('/^%%%%(.*?)%%%%(.*?)%%%%\/\1%%%%$/sm',$input,$matches);
I'm pretty sure you can't since these operations would need to save a variable and you can't in regex. You should try to do this using PHP's built-in token parser. http://php.net/manual/en/function.token-get-all.php

Regex equals condition except for certain condition

I have written the following Regex in PHP for use within preg_replace().
/\b\S*(.com|.net|.us|.biz|.org|.info|.xxx|.mx|.ca|.fr|.in|.cn|.hk|.ng|.pr|.ph|.tv|.ru|.ly|.de|.my|.ir)\S*\b/i
This regex removes all URLs from a string pretty effectively this far (though I am sure I can write a better one). I need to be able to add an exclusion though from a specific domain. So the pseudo code will look like this:
IF string contains: .com or .net or. biz etc... and does not contain: foo.com THEN execute condition.
Any idea on how to do this?
Just add a negative lookahead assertion:
/(?<=\s|^)(?!\S*foo\.com)\S*\.(com|net|us|biz|org|info|xxx|mx|ca|fr|in|cn|hk|ng|pr|ph|tv|ru|ly|de|my|ir)\S*\b/im
Also, remember that you need to escape the dot - and that you can move it outside the alternation since each of the alternatives starts with a dot.
Use preg_replace_callback instead.
Let your callback decide whether to replace.
It can give more flexibility if the requirements become too complicated for a simple regex.

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