Grab specific value from string with PHP

Question

I want to grab the full contents of the value utm_campaign from the $page variable using the following PHP:

$page = "utm_source=google&utm_campaign=Test | Test - Exact&utm_test=test";
preg_match_all('#utm_campaign=([^\s&]+)#', $page, $matches);
var_dump($matches);

However the above var_dump only outputs the following:

Test

Well, your regex contains `\s` which means it's stopping as soon as it finds a space. So if you remove `\s` your regex would work. However, it's very strange for an URL to contain spaces, they should be encoded as %20, so I think you should revisit how you obtained `$page` in the first place — Andrea Olivato, Jun 29 '21 at 14:52
I've run this on three different versions of PHP and the result is identical each time: `array(2) { [0]=> array(1) { [0]=> string(15) "utm_campaign=Te" } [1]=> array(1) { [0]=> string(2) "Te" } }`. Are you _certain_ that it is outputting just `Test` and not more? — Martin, Jun 29 '21 at 14:53
Maybe parse_str is what you're looking for: https://www.php.net/manual/en/function.parse-str.php — Martijn, Jun 29 '21 at 14:58

score 4 · Accepted Answer · answered Jun 29 '21 at 14:57

Try parse_str instead:

$page = "utm_source=google&utm_campaign=Test | Test - Exact&utm_test=test";
$res = [];
parse_str($page, $res);
var_dump($res);

This gives you:

array(3) { ["utm_source"]=> string(6) "google" ["utm_campaign"]=> string(19) "Test | Test - Exact" ["utm_test"]=> string(4) "test" }

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Jun 29 '21 at 14:55

Your regex is excluding spaces and &, this is what ^ does int [^\s&] so the match stops after the space in test. If you want the whole thing, change your regex to #utm_campaign=([^&]+)#

Using an online regex tester you can see what is being matched and not.

https://regex101.com/r/Frxwg0/1/

Grab specific value from string with PHP

2 Answers2

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