php-regexHow to extract a group when using regex in PHP?

Regex (regular expressions) can be used to extract a group of characters from a string in PHP.

$string = 'This is a string';

preg_match('/This (.*) string/', $string, $matches);

echo $matches[1];

The output of the above code will be:

is a

Code explanation

$string = 'This is a string'; - This is the string from which the group will be extracted.
preg_match('/This (.*) string/', $string, $matches); - This is the regex expression used to extract the group. The (.*) part of the expression is the group that will be extracted.
echo $matches[1]; - This will output the extracted group.