PHP regex groups captures

SPL preg_match_all will return regex groups starting on index 1 of the $matches variable. If you want to get only the second group you can use $matches[2] for example.

Syntax:

$matches = array(); 
preg_match_all(\
    '/(He)\w+ (\w+)/', 
    "Hello world\n Hello Sunshine", 
    $matches
); 
var_dump($matches);

Result:

array(3) {
  [0] =>
  array(2) {
    [0] =>
    string(11) "Hello world"
    [1] =>
    string(14) "Hello Sunshine"
  }
  [1] =>
  array(2) {
    [0] =>
    string(2) "He"
    [1] =>
    string(2) "He"
  }
  [2] =>
  array(2) {
    [0] =>
    string(5) "world"
    [1] =>
    string(8) "Sunshine"
  }
}

---

P.S. This answer is posted for the context of the question title after being directed here by a Google search. This was the information I was interested in when searching for this topic.

Assuming the tokens in your sample string never contain spaces, and are alphanumeric:

<?php
    $pattern = "/([\w|\d])+/";
    $string = "[abc - 123 - def - 456 - ghi - 789 - jkl]";
    preg_match_all($pattern, $string, $matches);
    print_r($matches[0]);
?>

Output:

Array
(
    [0] => abc
    [1] => 123
    [2] => def
    [3] => 456
    [4] => ghi
    [5] => 789
    [6] => jkl
)

This is not the job for the regexp. Match against \[([^\]]*)\], then split the first capture by the " - ".

<?php                                                                       
  $str = "[abc - def - ghi - jkl]";
  preg_match('/\[([^\]]*)\]/', $str, $re);
  $strs = split(' - ', $re[1]);
  print_r($strs);
?>