Regular Expression: negating newlines

[amitrus]

I would like to select the first line of a string that contains many newlines. For example:

$mystring = "First line
second line
third line";

My problem arrives when I try to select every character, starting at the beginning of the file, that is not a newline until the first newline. (if that makes any sense)

something like this seems intuitive but doesn't work.

ereg('^[(\n)]*\n', $mystring, $myarray);

Your thoughts are greatly appreciated

[cordex]

Why not explode() or tok() it?

[Anon]

Did you try:

ereg('^[\n]', $mystring, $myarray);

[Anon]

preg_match("/^(.*)/", $mystring, $match);
echo $match[1];
-or-
echo substr($mystring, 0, strpos($mystring, "\n"));

[amitrus]

This is just one example of a problem that I have run up against using regular expressions.

I would like to make a regular expression that can do the following:
<? select everything between X and Y, excluding other Y's ?>

The problem I am running up against is making Y into a string, rather than a character.

thanks,
Amitrus

[amitrus]

ereg('^[\n]', $mystring, $myarray);

wouldn't that also negate singular forward slashes and singular n's?

thanks,
Amitrus