Named regex matches in php

A good example of this is matching parameters in URLs. You can give the variables in your URL a name making your code a bit more readable. In the URL /category/1/post/5 we want to get the category id and the post id. A simple match would be to simply match the digits.
^\\/category\\/(\\d+)\\/post\\/(\\d+)$

This would then give you code something like:

$input_line = '/category/1/post/5'
preg_match('/^\\/category\\/(\\d+)\\/post\\/(\\d+)$/', $input_line, $output_array);

if ($output_array[1] === 1 && $output_array[2] === 5) {
    // Do some magic
}

We can give our matches a name by adding a ?<name> to your pattern. So your new pattern will look like:

^\\/category\\/(?<category_id>\\d+)\\/post\\/(?<post_id>\\d+)$

Now we can refactor our code to make it that bit more readable:

$input_line = '/category/1/post/5'
preg_match('^\\/category\\/(?<category_id>\\d+)\\/post\\/(?<post_id>\\d+)$', $input_line, $output_array);

if ($output_array['category_id'] === 1 && $output_array['post_id'] === 5) {
    // Do some magic
}

Links to php live regex

• https://www.phpliveregex.com/p/wec
• https://www.phpliveregex.com/p/wed

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