Need help with preg_match_all - urgent!

ppowell

I have a rather large document from which I need to find all matching patterns of

word/word

(like a MIME type)

I tried this and it constantly fails:

preg_match_all('/\n+([a-zA-Z0-9\-_\.]+\/)+[a-zA-Z0-9\-_\.]+)\n+/m', $contents, $matches, PREG_SET_ORDER);

I honestly need this fixed immediately they are expecting a presentation this afternoon and this is the only thing preventing me from getting it to work!

Help!
Thanx
Phil

swr

I would suggest not using \n in a regular expression. Different systems use different characters for line endings. Also, the first line does not start with \n. Instead, try ^ for the start of a line and $ for the end.

Also, you have mismatched brackets.

Maybe something like this:

'/^{([\w-.]+)/([\w-.]+)$/m'}

\w matches alpha-numeric and underscore.

ppowell

Made it by the seat of my pants!!

Actually it wasn't as much the preg_match_all as it was the way I handled the resulting $matches array was the problem the whole time. Though I did take off the "\n" and did not include ^ and $ and everything worked perfectly!

Phil

sfullman

I would add that you might want to use \s (whitespace) instead of \n. \s catches tab, space, \n, and \r (possibly more than that)

Also using ^ and $ at the start and end means the string can contain nothing else -- hardly what you'd want.

swr

sfullman,
The pattern was using the m modifier, which causes ^ and $ to match line endings, not just string start/end. See here:
http://www.php.net/manual/en/pcre.pattern.modifiers.php

I see I forgot to escape the / in the pattern I posted. Oops.