Regular Expressions in PHP

[jpadie]

I'm having some trouble constructing a pattern that works adequately with php's preg_* functions. when I try various patterns in external agents it seems to work fine. very bizarre.

I am writing a partial sql parsing engine for a project to port wordpress to PDO abstraction layer compatibility and one of the things I need to achieve is to remove all quoted parameters.

the problem I'm running into is with escaped content. take for example this clause

Update table set field1 = "somevalue", field2  = 'John\'s toy', field3 = "<img href=\"image.php\">"

I'm looking for an array of extracts which should have

[0] => somevalue
[1] => John\'s toy
[2] => <img href=\"image.php\">

the pattern that i have working in reggy (Mac OSX regular expressions GUI) is

[^\\]('|")(.*?)[^\\]\1

I'd expect this to look like so in php

$pattern = '/[^\\\\](\'|")(.*?)[^\\\\]\\1/imx';

but this produces rubbish results.

is the php PCRE implementation bust or am I just in a head spin (in which case an alternative solution would be much appreciated)? I'm quite prepared to believe that i've just got my head on backwards - i've had to design far too many regular expressions for this project and my brain is a-burnin...

thanks
Justin

 

[jpadie]

please disregard. the issue was related to the escaping of a serialised object that i was trying to parse.

the pattern works ok although does not deliver what I need, but that, perhaps, is the subject of a different post!