Greedy matching problem with preg-replac

[Anon]

I am coding in php 3.0. I have a html template page containing a form with two dates in the form of six dropdown boxes, three dropdown boxes for each date.... e.g the first drop down box is for the months January to December, the second 0-31, etc.
This template page is read in using a php3 page (frontpage.php3) which is the starting page for the application.

---

The user selects two dates and presses a submit button. User is passed to create_customers.php3 which picks thirty customers from a database between the dates provided. However if one of the dates is incorrect, something like the 31 February, I use a hidden form on create_customers.php3 to store the date values and I pass them back to frontpage.php3. This page again reads in the html template but uses a preg_replace so that instead of just bringing up a blank page, the user can see the dates he has just entered and make the necessary corrections. I use the line
if ($montha){
$buffer=preg_replace("/,option>$montha/i","option SELECTED>$montha",$buffer);
}
to accomplish this. The problem that I have is that preg_replace is using what I think is known as greedy matching and replaces both dates with the second one. I see that there is a solution to this with php 4.0 where you can use a limit as an argument to preg_replace so that only the first matching occurence of the string will be replaced. Does anyone have any suggestions as to how I should proceed from here?
Thanks,Sean

[sfullman]

Sean, did you ever figure out the greedy matching issue?

My problem is, suppose you have the following:

<form attributes="whatever"> word word etc. </form> blah <form attributes="whatever" > blah blah </form>

This regex is gonna get Everything:

'(<form)[^{>]>.(</form>)'}

Now in English language I would say:

"Find <form , then attributes in the form, then a closing >, then anything EXCEPT A STRING </form>, and then a </form> string."

That would solve the greediness. I know how to exclude a single character, e.g. [^a] excludes a, but I don't know how to exclude a STRING, i.e. this-- [^(</form>)] -- DOESN'T WORK BECAUSE () LOSE THEIR POWER INSIDE THE [] BRACKETS.

I hope there is an answer to this issue and that I haven't outsmarted regular expressions already.

Sam Fullman