Regular Expressions

[minimitt]

Can anybody help me on this? I want to search a string for the begining of a tag. I know the first portion of the begining tag (<font) and i need to allow for anything up to the end of the begining tag (>). When I try to do a search for this I get everything after the <font but it does not stop at the first > which would be the end of the begining tag. Any suggestions?

Mitt

[undertow]

I think what you're referring to is the so-called "greed star". I'm assuming your pattern looks something like <font .> (I'm not very good at regexps but I know "." means any character and "" (star) means zero or more of them. If the star is "greedy" it will match up to the last ">" found, since it would techincally still fit the pattern. If it was ungreedy, it would go up to the first one, which is what you want.

There is an option for this in PCRE. I'm not sure exactly how it works myself, but you can check http://www.php.net/manual/en/pcre.pattern.syntax.php and http://www.php.net/manual/en/pcre.pattern.modifiers.php, searching those pages for "greed".

[tomhath]

It's hard to help without seeing what you have already.

The quick and dirty expression would be to match every character except a ">" like this:

([^>]*)

The limitation is that it will stop if there is a "V" inside a quoted string. Things get really difficult if you try to get past quoted or escaped characters.

[simonsky]

simply add a ? after the . , that would make your match non-greedy, something like /<font.?>/i should do the job.

Hope it helps.

Simonsky

[scoppc]

<?php
$tag="<font color=red size=2>";
$get=preg_replace("/^(<font)(.*)(>)$/","\\2",$tag);
echo $get;
?>

The code above will display color=red size=2.
Is that what you want to get?

Note:
I dunno what happen to this forum. There should be two backslashes before "2" at the preg_replace syntax (not one).
There is no space after the ">" symbol on the same line.