Regex to match character string with none to multiple hyphens

Question

Hi I need to match a character string which can have 0+ hyphens in between the characters. I'm using PHP preg-match to do this. The characters can be upper or lowercase. Here's a few examples:

TESTTESTtest published successfully
test-TEST-test published successfully
Test-test published successfully

My regex needs to capture all these different cases.

I am going through a log line by line and trying to match the regex below to each line.

This is my current if statement:

if(preg_match('/(\w*) published successfully/',$line,$matches){

}

I just used \w* as my character capture as I didn't need to worry about hyphens before but I need to adapt this to handle the new scenario. Can anyone help me out?

Could you please explain what you are doing and why expode("-", $s) does not work? — Wiktor Stribiżew
– Wiktor Stribiżew, Commented Apr 25, 2017 at 9:38
Hi I've added additional information to my initial question, not sure how I would use explode in this instance but I probably didn't have enough information provided before. — olliejjc16
– olliejjc16, Commented Apr 25, 2017 at 9:45
Good, haven't you thought of character classes? Like [\w-]*? Do you have to worry about cases like ------ published successfully? — Wiktor Stribiżew
– Wiktor Stribiżew, Commented Apr 25, 2017 at 9:46
Wow that worked perfectly thank you, I don't really know much about regex I'm working off someone else's code so I was struggling to adapt it, I had tried something like ([\w-*]) and it wasn't working but I was clearly typing it out wrong. Thanks so much, I don't need to worry about the edge cases you mentioned what you provided is fine. Thanks again! — olliejjc16
– olliejjc16, Commented Apr 25, 2017 at 9:53

Graham · Accepted Answer · 2017-09-24 14:54:56Z

1

If you do not need to worry about edge cases like ----- published successfully all you need is to add the \w and - to a character class [...] (and I also suggest using a + quantifier to match 1 or more occurrences, not 0 or more, to avoid getting empty matches):

if(preg_match('/([\w-]+) published successfully/',$line,$matches){

}

See the regex demo.

edited Sep 24, 2017 at 14:54

Graham

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answered Apr 25, 2017 at 9:56

Wiktor Stribiżew

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