I'm currently having a small problem with the following regex in PHP:
preg_match_all('/(.*)(XS|S|M|XL|XXL|L)(.*)/i', '00236XL00', $arr, PREG_PATTERN_ORDER);
It returns L for the size when I want XL in this case.
It works fine if I supply an ID with just L (e.g. 002465L00) in it.
Can you tell me what I did wrong?
I tried moving the L to the end of the group but it did not help.
The first group, (.*), is greedy, and will match as much as it can. Since the second group will still match if the first one "takes" 00236X, that is what will happen. The simplest fix, if the data presented above is typical, is to change the . to [0-9]. Will this still match your data? If not, please give more examples.
To avoid the greedyness, you can make the other groups lazy instead, by using the ? operator. So, something like /(.*?)(XS|S|M|XL|XXL|L)(.*)/i should work.
Seems that your ID's are only digits surrounding the size code.
So what about to look for non-digit characters?
preg_match_all('/([^0-9]+)/i', '00236XL00', $arr, PREG_PATTERN_ORDER);
EDIT after author's comment:
preg_match_all('/[A-Z][A-Z]\-\d+([A-Z]+)\d+/i', 'XX-00236XL00', $arr, PREG_PATTERN_ORDER);