Extract substring from array of strpos values

Question

I have the following string

$string = "Hello World!<br />- 8/7/2013<br />Content<br />- 8/6/2013<br />Hello World";

I want to extract all the information between the dash + space ("- ") and the next line break tag. Is that possible? I've been researching Google for hours but no luck. I'm thinking that I need an array of strpos of the "- " and the following line break tag and then batch substr them. But of course if you can do this any other way, that would be so much appreciated!

Answer 1

I've updated my answer to handle multiple occurances.

You can do this with a simple regular expression:

preg_match_all("@- (.*)<br />@U", $string, $matches);
print_r($matches[1]);

The above will print

Array
(
    [0] => 8/7/2013
    [1] => 8/6/2013
)

This matches the pattern - (.*)<br /> with (.*) meaning anything. The @s here work as delimiters to separate the actual pattern with the modifiers (in this case U meaning an ungreedy match).

Answer 2

regular expressions will give you the most control, but here is a quick demo using strpos and substr to get what you asked for:

$strStart = strpos($string, '- ');
$strLength = strpos($string, '<br') - $strStart;
substr( $string, $strStart, $strLength );