Stopping Ereg On First Result

Anon

This one should be an easy one for someone, but I havn't found a way to solve my problem yet.

I'm trying to use ereg to parse a file and grab everything between the word TOTALS and '<.'

Unfortunately, there are several occurances of <. and it won't stop and grabs everything between TOTALS and the last occurance of <. which is much more than I want.

Here is the line of code I'm using:

ereg("(TOTALS)(.*)(<.)", $string, $totals);

Thanks for your help.

Anon

search the forum, this question has already been answered.

Vincent, maybe this is one for YASP?

Anon

Search for the term "greedy" in this forum. What you are observing is the "greediness" of regular expressions. If I remember correctly, a question mark ? put in the right place in your regexp will make it not so greedy.

Anon

Thanks for the replies. But I've searched and thus far I havn't found an answer to my problem.

In all the past posts the answers were either too vague or provided the perl solution which is said to be simmilar to PHP but in reality does not work for PHP.

I've tried all forms of adding '*?', '??', '.?', etc. and too no avail.

Is it not possible to limit the Greediness of ereg?

Anon

You could try preg instead of ereg. (preg is perl compatible.)

Anon

Well, the Perl solution will work for PHP. Look up the bit about perl-compatible regular expressions:

preg_match("TOTALS(.*?)<.", $string, $totals);

will return the bit desired in $totals[1]

Do the ereg_* functions have nongreediness? I dunno, I always use the PCRE versions instead - they're more flexible and seem to be faster, too.

Anon

Everything was correct except the expression itself; I'd cut-and-pasted from the ereg version and forgot the regexp delimiters

So:

preg_match("/TOTALS(.*?)<./", $string, $totals);

Anon

Thanks, I much appreciate the help.