Need perl pattern matching expert help!

Anon

I am trying to use the preg_match_all to match something like this..

SomeWords:<a href="www.url.com/somewhere/somefile.html">SomeWords</a>(SomeWords), <a href="www.url.com/somewhere/somefile.html">SomeWords</a>, <a href="www.url.com/somewhere/somefile.html">SomeWords</a>(SomeWords).

The pattern is like the example above, it first start with some words and then a colon, then, a URL, then (some words)

(some words) may or may not appear, and <a href="www.url.com/somewhere/somefile.html">SomeWords</a>(SomeWords) will repeat and separate by a comma. The end of line have a period.

I got something like this
preg_match_all("/(.?)(<a href=\"(http:\/\/.?)\">(.?)<\/a>)(\w?)./i", $myStr, $arrayoflinks3);

but it doesn't quite work. Anyone know how to match this?

[deleted]

If you are only interested in the href's, then that's all you should be looking for; the start and end of an href.

Be sure to add the s right next to the i at the end, so make the match extend newline chars. otherwise, your math will only be done upto the first newline char.

Anon

I am interested in the whole string in that pattern....So, just looking for href tag wont't work.

The problem is that the repeat string happen only in the second half of the statement. The whole statement itself do not repeat.

Anon

Let me try to make a more clear example to explain.

In a web page, there is a list of category

CPU: <a href="http://www.test.com/test/test.html">Pentium 3</a>(Intel), <a href="http://www.test.com/test/test2.html">Pentium 2</a>, <a href="http://www.test.com/test/test3.html">TB</a>(AMD).

RAM: <a href="http://www.test.com/test/test4.html">Whatever</a>, <a href="http://www.test.com/test/test5.html">Whatever 2</a>(hello).

...etc

Each category have at least 1 item. The parentheses may or may not show.
I want to catch each category into an array.

Any ideas?

[deleted]

And what do you want to get out exactly?

Anon

As I said , since the whole page is a listing of the category, I want EACH category goes into the array. Let me use the example I used before.

After matching
$myArray[0] will have the string "CPU: <a href="http://www.test.com/test/test.html">Pentium 3</a>(Intel), <a href="http://www.test.com/test/test2.html">Pentium 2</a>, <a href="http://www.test.com/test/test3.html">TB</a>(AMD)."

and then $myArray[1] will have the string
"RAM: <a href="http://www.test.com/test/test4.html">Whatever</a>, <a href="http://www.test.com/test/test5.html">Whatever 2</a>(hello). "

$myArray[2] = so on and so on until each category all goes into the array.

[deleted]

Aha, and the blocks are always seperated by an empty line?
in that case, just use explode() and use a double newline as the pattern

$array=explode("\n\n",$data);