ereg regex - am I doing this right?

[Anon]

Hey,

I have opened a text file and placed the contents into an array. The following command produces the expected result:

Command
echo $strArticle[0];

Result
DATE: Tue 30-Sep-1997
AUTHOR: wright
FULL TEXT:
BART WRIGHT: You gotta like these guys' chances
There were times during the season when they played like a team
for the ages, a team that could match up with the greatest
postseason teams in baseball history...

I desire to pass the value of that array to a regex that breaks the value into 4 different pieces and inserts them into a new array. I'll be using the new array values in a MySQL insertion query. Here is my first attempt:

Command
ereg("^DATE: (.*)<br>$", $strArticle[0], $strArticleField);
echo $strArticleDate = $strArticleField[1];

Result
Tue 30-Sep-1997
AUTHOR: wright
FULL TEXT:
BART WRIGHT: You gotta like these guys' chances
There were times during the season when they played like a team
for the ages, a team that could match up with the greatest
postseason teams in baseball history...

As you can see, I was successful in getting just the date (that is, DATE: and <br> have been removed) but the rest of the contents of the array element were included. My problem is that I don't want anything but the actual date.

I assume that I have made a mistake in my ereg statement or I don't understand how ereg works. Perhaps I should be using a different function? Any advice would be welcomed.

Thanks,
Jerry Cornelius
[e-mail]

[Anon]

Changing "(.)" to "(.?)" should fix this. The quantifying operators (*, +, ? and {}) are greedy, they always try to match as much as possible - in this case, everything from after the "DATE: " to the last "<br>" in the string.

Tagging an extra '?' after such an operator makes it ungreedy - they'll try and match as little as possible - in this case, only as far as the first "<br>" they come across - which is what you want.

[sjokki]

The ereg-functions don't have ungreedy operators. That's one of the reasons you should always use preg instead of ereg.

preg_match('/^DATE: (.*?)<br>$/', $strArticle[0], $strArticleField);

[Anon]

Heh, forgot abouat that 🙂 I always use PCRE myself anyway...