Regular expressions

Anon

Howdy.

I'm having some problems with these darned reg exps.

Basically i have a file filled to the brim with misc stuff.
But i wanna return what's between

and

This occurs on several places in the file and i want to get them all.

First problem i ran into was that the content between these two tags span over several lines in the file.
So i'm not sure how to read the file in the first place, and ofcourse the reg exp to get the text in between.

Thanks in Advance.

vsego

// Read the file into a single var:
$f = file($filename);
$text = "";
foreach ($f as $line) $text .= $line;
// Parse the file
while (eregi("(.)(.)$", $text, $reOut)) {
echo $reOut[1]." \n";
$text = $reOut[2];
}

I'm not sure about this - if ereg gets the last appereance of you won't get the others. If this happens, post here and I'll provide workaround.

Warning: this may be very slow and/or memory-greedy on big text files!

Anon

Hi thanks for the help, but it didn't seem to work.
I've done what i've could with my very weak knowledge of regular expressions, but it doesn't seem to stop at the "".

vsego

Sorry, I forgot that ereg() uses a greedy algorithm. Here is the correct one:

$text = "I'm a\nlittle\nsomething, don't know what.";

function negateString($s) {
$res = "[^".$s[0]."]";
for ($i = 1; $i < strlen($s); $i++)
$res .= "|".substr($s, 0, $i)."[^{".$s[$i]."]";}
return "($res)";
}

while (eregi("(".negateString("").")(.)$", $text, $reOut)) {
echo $reOut[1]." \n";
$text = $reOut[3];
}

Good luck!