正则表达式在PHP中无法正常工作

Question

I have this data:

{"names":["George","Eric","Alice"]}

And I want to use preg_match_all to filter out the words in between quotation like this:

$s = $data;

if (preg_match_all('/"([^:]*)"/', $s, $matches)) {
        echo join("
", $matches[1]);
}

But this is outputting names George","Eric","Alice I tried many things but I cant figure it out.

Answer 1

* matches greedy (as much as possible). Use non-greey version: *?

if (preg_match_all('/"([^:]*?)"/', $s, $matches)) {
    echo join("
", $matches[1]);
}

output:

names
George
Eric
Alice

UPDATE

json_decode is more appropriate for this kind of work. Try following:

foreach (json_decode($s, true) as $key => $value) {
    echo $key . "
";
    echo join("
", $value);
}