Weird preg_match_all problem

strui013

Hey Folks,

I have the following preg_match_all problem, I need an array of matches but instead I get one array index back with all matches glued on eachother. Let me visualize this.

The page looks something like this:

The part which I need are the ID's, which are 3239, 3452 and 3642, I wrote this preg for this:

preg_match_all("/<a href=show.php\?ID=(.)&type=file>(.)<\/a> /i", $contents, $links);

Strange enough this gives back an array of only one slice which looks like this: <a href=show.php?ID=3239&type=file>File1</a> <a href=show.php?ID=3452&type=file>File2</a> <a href=show.php?ID=3642&type=file>File3</a>

But instead I need an array of 3 slices (in this case) with only the ID numbers in it.

Ive been suffering now for 2 hours on this problem, I would be very grateful for a solution.

Thanks!

Johan

dnast

Try putting a ? after both the *'s. This notation has to do with preg being "greedy", but I honestly don't know the specifics as I haven't been using regular expressions very long. Adding a ? has helped me in a few situations.

preg_match_all("/<a href=show.php\?ID=(.?)&type=file>(.?)<\/a> /i", $contents, $links);

drew010

well, i know that if you echo $links[0] it will show the entire string matched by your expression. the actual brackets get numbers, starting from 1 and so on. so i think if you echo $links[1] and echo $links[3] you would see 3239 and then 3452.

if you didnt get that, it means that index 0 shows the whole string that got matched, and for every expression you have inside () will get an index starting from 1.

strui013

Thanks a lot dnast and drew010, it works now 🙂 thanks guys!