$re = '/(?<=^.. |^... |^.... )([^,]*,[^,:]*)/m';
$str = '46. Delmay, B.: I personaggi della Divina Commedia. Volume 201. Olschki (1986)
129. Kurucz, R.: Atlas9 stellar atmosphere programs and 2 km/s grid. ATLAS9 Stellar Atmosphere Programs and 2 km/s grid. Kurucz CD-ROM No. 13. Cambridge, Mass.: Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, 1993. 13 (1993)
130. Andrewes, D.G., Holton, J.R., Leovy, C.B.: Middle atmosphere dynamics. Number 40. Academic press (1987)
6. Welch, T.A.: A technique for high-performance data compression. Computer 17(6) (1984) 8–19
47. Alighieri, D., Landino, C., da Figino, P., Capcasa, M.: La divina commedia. G. Silvestri (1829)';
preg_match_all($re, $str, $matches, PREG_SET_ORDER, 0);
// Print the entire match result
var_dump($matches);
Please keep in mind that these code samples are automatically generated and are not guaranteed to work. If you find any syntax errors, feel free to submit a bug report. For a full regex reference for PHP, please visit: http://php.net/manual/en/ref.pcre.php