Regex to parse pretend html ....

[Anon]

Here's one for you guys...

admittedly, I am not the regex master, but I have a good grasp of it.. and I can't figure this one out.

I need to find text between 2 delimiters, multiple times..e,

[begin] text here [end]

It works in this scenario... but if I do

[begin] first section here [end] sfkjsk sdfsd [begin] second section here [end] skdfsdkj

The response I get is:
first section here [end] sfkjsk sdfsd [begin] second section her

I think its because regex starts at the beginning and end and works to the middle? That's all I can come up with... anyone have any ideas here?

Thanks in advance
-Brian

[Anon]

It's because the regex algorithm is normally "greedy", matching the longest possible sequence that fits the pattern, rather than the shortest. If you're using the perl-compatible regex functions, you can tell it to be non-greedy. This can sometimes be dangerous (causing it to match nothing, or much less than you wanted) but if you have an explicit end tag which is guaranteed to not appear in the text of interest, it should work quite fine.

[Anon]

Kirk, you saved the day!

Thanks man!

[Anon]

I am having the exact same proble. Kirk's answer help me understand the problem, but I am still confused on how to fix it. Any help would be appreciated.

Derek