avoiding nested tags

[Anon]

i'm doing a pattern search, and i want to pick up tables, but not nested ones. (that is, in a nested table, the innermost one will be picked up on the first pass, then the outer one on a second and so on.)

so, i've got my pattern /<table([^{>])>(.?)</table>/i} which picks up the tables fine, but how do i stop it matching..

#from here
<table>
<table>
</table>
#to here

</table>

--
rad

[Anon]

You'd probably have to use recursion. That can be very tricky.

The idea is that you write a function to parse the html.
When you find a table, read all that is in that table, and pass it back to the function itself, so a new thread of the function now starts reading
just the outer-most table.
Now when it finds a new table in the outer most table, it will call itself again, working with the second outer-most table.

Just amke sure to have a failsafe mechanism to stop the whole thing after x recursions, or you could get an infinite loop if you make a typo somewhere.

[Anon]

clever! i hadn't thought of that.

although my project manager will have kittens when he sees it (he's a bit of a purist :-) )

--
rad