Simple regex question

[Anon]

Hey all,

First, I tried finding the answer to this one on my own, but any question I found similar to mine was unanswered.

Say I have a string, $string.

$string="<p>text1</p><p>text2</p><p>text3</p>";

I want to extract text1.

eregi("<p>(.*)</p>", $string, $foo);

echo "$foo[1]" returns: text1</p><p>text2</p><p>text3.

Why? And how do I get around this? I thought I understood regular expressions until I ran into this problem.

Thanks!!

[nightowl]

Read about this one somewhere...

Regex "are greedy", they take as much as they can get... I think it was on www.onlamp.com that I saw a solution for it. Though I can't find the article immediately.

[ciberkinki]

Try this, it works for me:

preg_match ("/<p>.*<\/p>/U", $string, $foo);

OR

preg_match ("/<p>.*?<\/p>/", $string, $foo);

this way it's going to match the least characters possible.

[Anon]

Did the trick. Thanks Nacho!!