Regular Expression

[Anon]

Why is the last <A> greedy? And how do I stop it?

$re = "(<A>){1}.?<B>.?(<A>){1}";
$html = "<A>This part <B> should be selected <A> The rest <A> shoul be <A> left alone";

echo ereg_replace($re,"-RIPPED-",$html);

[lawnmowerman]

That is because regular expressions are inherently greedy 🙂 Regexps will try to find the largest match possible...this means your code will find "^<A>entire string<A>$" and then move in towards the middle until the largest match possible is found.

Try this:

$re = "^{<A>[[:alnum:]} ]*<A>";

This makes the regexp find "<A>" at the beginning of the line, followed by any alphanumeric text (and spaces) that may exist, up until another "<A>" is encountered.

Hope this helps!

-Rich