Parse a string with placeholders into an array with PHP

Question

I have a string that like

$input = '%name (%postcode) <%email>';

How can I detect the placeholders with the scheme %NAME so that I get an array

$wildcards = array('name', 'postcode', 'email');

in the end?

It should recognize any wildcards following the wildcard scheme in any string. So the function should also convert

'%address (%name)'

to

array('address', 'name')

The wildcard scheme is not fixed, so if you have a better solution those can be changed. I fiddled around with sscanf(), but as the format of the input string varies I need something more flexible and it did not suit my needs.

Answer 1

This will do the job:

$input = '%name (%postcode) <%email>';
preg_match_all('/%(\w+)/', $input, $m);
$wildcards = $m[1];
print_r($wildcards);

Outut:

Array
(
    [0] => name
    [1] => postcode
    [2] => email
)