preg_replace Smallest Match

[Anon]

Hi there, I'm pretty new to PHP and regular expressions in general, but I've got a question that's sort of bothering me. Suppose I have the following input:

$t = "[start] data1 [end][start] data2 [end]";

If I do a preg_replace like this:

$pattern = array("/start[end]/");
$replace = array("[start]<b>\1</b>[end]");

preg_replace($pattern, $replace, $t);

My understanding is that it would put everything between the FIRST [start] and the LAST [end] in bold because it goes for the largest match on the input. What I want though is the shortest match. How do I construct the pattern so that it'll match each set of [start][end] and do the replace on what's in the middle? In the above case "data1" and "data2" should be bold separately.

Thanks a lot for your help...

[Anon]

Doh, in the above my HTML got translated. The line with the $replace should be:

$replace = array("[start]\1[end]");

Where and are the normal HTML bold tags. Sorry about that.

[sjokki]

Use '.?' instead of '.'

The '?' makes '*' ungreedy.

[Anon]

Thanks! Works perfectly...