Using regular expression subpattern to instead of

Question

I'm interested if its possible to make include subpattern (child pattern) into a another pattern that would allow me to convert those 2 preg_match and preg_match_all into one preg_match/preg_match_all.

<?php

$data = 'office phones tel[phone] tel[phone] tel[phone] home phones tel[phone] tel[phone] tel[phone]';

preg_match('/phones(.*)home phones/', $data, $matches); // 1st operation
preg_match_all('/[0-9]{4,12}/',  $matches[1],  $matches); // 2nd operation

var_dump($matches);

// Question is: How to get same output with just only one preg_match

preg_match('/phones(SUBPATTERN)home phones/', $data, $result_data);

// Where SUBPATTERN is a pattern that would do exactly what 2nd operation did
// so $result_data contains what does $matches (array structure can be different can be 3 dimmensional array not only 2)

Example data: https://eval.in/138817

Note: This question is another approach to get answer which had different data: PHP Regular expression return submatches as array

Answer 1

$data = 'office phones tel[phone] tel[phone] tel[phone] home phones tel[phone] tel[phone] tel[phone]';


preg_match_all('/[0-9]{4,12}/', $data,  $matches); // 2nd operation

var_dump($matches);

Like this example

Answer 2

Use positive lookahead (?=.*?home)

<?php

$data = 'office phones tel[phone] tel[phone] tel[phone] home phones tel[phone] tel[phone] tel[phone]';
preg_match_all('/([\d]{2,})(?=.*?home)/', $data, $matches, PREG_PATTERN_ORDER);
print_r($matches[1]);

Array
(
    [0] => 6665555998
    [1] => 555666888
    [2] => 555688855
)

?>

PHP
http://ideone.com/nryjIm

REGEX
http://regex101.com/r/oV7mO2

This is an update based on your comment:

    $pnlist = "office phones tel[phone] tel[phone] tel[phone] home phones tel[phone] tel[phone] tel[phone]";

/*1*/    preg_match_all('/(?:office)(.*?)(?:home)/', $pnlist, $result, PREG_PATTERN_ORDER);
/*2*/    preg_match_all('/([\d]{2,})/', $result[1][0], $pn, PREG_PATTERN_ORDER);

    print_r($pn[1]);

/*
Array ( 
 [0] => 6665555998
 [1] => 555666888
 [2] => 555688855
 ) 
*/

You can change the first preg_match_all start(office) and ending (home) values to whatever you want, then you match the phone numbers on that group.

Answer 3

You can use the \G anchor with a global research (preg_match_all):

$pattern = '~(?:office phones|\G(?!\A)) tel\d+ \K\d{4,12}~';
preg_match_all($pattern, $data, $matches);

print_r($matches);

\G is an anchor for the position in the string after the last match, when there is not yet match (at the begining) it is equivalent to the \A anchor.

\K is used to remove the left part of the match from match result.