need help with a regular expression

[Stew_McGruff]

I'm having some trouble doing a regular expression. I need code to get all of the alt tags from a page and put them into an array, but it fails miserably:

preg_match_all("'alt=(\")(.*)(\")'i",$html,$alt_tag);

then I was planning to pull all of $alt_tags[2] as the actual text I needed. The problem is, it only works if the alt tag is at the end if the image. For instance, take these two image tags:

<img src="blah" alt="image 1" border="1">

<img alt="image 2" src="blah" border="1">

The first one will match fine, and $alt_tag[2]=image 1. however, in the second example, $alt_tag[2] becomes image 2 src="blah" border="1

for some reason the " won't match unless it is right before the > Very strange, I can't figure out why.
Any guidence would be greatly appreciated

[Weedpacket]

Try (.*?)

[Stew_McGruff]

that did the trick, you are my hero

[xblue]

your original regexp failed because quantifiers (like * for 0 or more occurrences) are "greedy" by default, i.e. they consume as much as they can.

you can make them behave ungreedy by inserting a ?, but where possible it's usually more efficient to use negated character classes, like
[^\"] (matches anything that is not a doublequote)

some more things:
you can choose any special character as delimiter (may save some escaping)
you don't need the parentheses unless you need to group something or want to reuse it.

so your pattern could be condensed to:

'/alt="[^"]*"/i'