修剪PHP正则表达式中的子字符串

Question

I have a string which may contain a pattern like:

LINK([anchor text],[link])

What I would like to do is transform this expression into a HTML link:

<a href="link">anchor text</a>

At the moment, I'm performing the replacement with the following PHP snippet:

$string = 'LINK(  some anchor text    ,   http://mydomain.com  )';
$search = '/LINK\s*\(\s*(.+),\s*([^\s]+)\s*\)/';
$replace = '<a href="$2">$1</a>';
preg_replace($search, $replace, $string);

The problem I'm facing are the spaces after the anchor text. Fortunately, in HTML multiple spaces are interpreted as a single space, but in this example I would however show a link with a (underlined) annoying space. Is there any way to trim this anchor text? I can't treat it as the "link" substring, since it may contain spaces.

Answer 1

Assuming that the anchor text cannot contain commas or more than 1 space in a row, you could perhaps use:

LINK\s*\(\s*([^\s,]+(?:\s[^\s,]+)*)\s*,\s*(\S+)\s*\)

regex101 demo

Instead of .+, I'm using [^\s,]+(?:\s[^\s,]+)* which will match one word, and more words separated by space (where a word is a series of non-space characters with at least one character).

Also changed your negated class [^\s] which appears later on to \S.