little reg ex problem

j0sh

hi all.

i'm trying to create my own template system. i wanna find all variable placeholders "{VARIABLE_NAME99}" in a string, so i use the following reg ex:

(.){([a-zA-Z0-9_]+)}(.)

the problem is, that the first (.*) is greedy, so it always finds the last variable placeholder first! it searches till the last appearance of { instead of searching for the first appearance of it!

i tried it with

(.?){([a-zA-Z0-9_]+)}(.)

like i saw it on www.regular-expressions.info but then php tells me

Warning: ereg(): REG_BADRPT:srepetition-operator operand invalid

so what can i do against the greediness of (.*) ?

thanks very much for help!

josh

goa103

Try this PERL regexp to avoid greediness :

/{[a-z0-9]}/ig

i : case insensitive
g : avoid greediness

Use the preg_match PHP function. To learn more about regexp, read the Regular Expression Functions (Perl-Compatible) pages about pattern modifiers and syntax. There are also some highlighting articles on PHP Builder but they're getting old 🙂.

j0sh

what's the big difference between ereg and preg_match? i heard preg_match is faster...

thank you anyway so far. 🙂 i'll give it a try.

by the way, are you a goa / psytrance freak or where have you got your name from? 🙂

goa103

Originally posted by j0sh
what's the big difference between ereg and preg_match? i heard preg_match is faster...

Faster, better, stronger 🙂. Anyway I never found a way to make the ereg functions to work, preg functions work just fine !

by the way, are you a goa / psytrance freak or where have you got your name from? 🙂

No no goa like the orange juice 🙂. It's what a friend of mine said the first time she heard my nickname :p.

I'm under heavy dark-goa-psykedelik-trance-core-elektro, and you ? ^{^.}

So yes I got my nick from the goa trance music genre.

j0sh

ok thank you, i'll try the preg_match. 🙂

hehe, don't really get the link to the orange juice thingy, but anyway... 😉

i love goa, especially the less "trancy" one, but with much guitar and dark basses! 🙂
but i don't like big festivals, they are too commercial; i love the small "goa-family"-like parties somewhere in the woods or in the mountains. 🆒

btw silicon sound from france is one of my favorites. 🙂

goa103

Originally posted by j0sh
hehe, don't really get the link to the orange juice thingy, but anyway... 😉

Let's picture it then 🙂.

i love goa, especially the less "trancy" one, but with much guitar and dark basses! 🙂
but i don't like big festivals, they are too commercial; i love the small "goa-family"-like parties somewhere in the woods or in the mountains. 🆒

btw silicon sound from france is one of my favorites. 🙂

About festivals I don't really know as I never really went to a big festivals. My sisters went to the BOOM Festival in Portugal last august, we also thought about going to the Zoom Cybertribal festival (Zürich) where DJ Tsuyoshi (Prana) was mixing but none of us could make it. Such a pity as I live in Lyon (France), not that far from Zürich.

Like you said small parties might be better but since a few years, they're hard to plan ! Free parties are kind of forbidden in France for example ! Because of the drugs, noise, space... It sux 🙁.

About Silicon Sound. Don't know them ! I will try to find some tunes. My fav band is probably Juno Reactor, their Pistolero is one of the best tune I have ever heard, specially the remixed ones.

To tell you the truth I'm not that into goa anymore since I discovered other music genres like dark-elektro, EBM, symphonic metal... I stongly advice you to try Hocico for example.

j0sh

the zoom festival is right after the street parade, but i dont know if it will be next year again because of the noise disturbances this year.

i heard from the boom festival... don't know if it's great or not... 😉

in switzerland there are still many small outdoor partys, take a look at www.goa.ch (horrible site, btw). 🙂

i'll take a look at hocico... thank you. 🙂

sfullman

I'm glad I scrolled down through the mush to see you didn't (?) get an answer.

$string="My name is {VARIABLE_NAME99}";

preg_match( '/{[a-z0-9_]+}/',$string,$a);

you weren't escaping the { } characters with \

on the issue of (.)*, I'm not sure why you were using, but non-greedyness can be achieved like this:

(.|\s)*?xxx

which means "any character or whitespace, any number of times (including zero times), but STOP when you get to the FIRST OCCURRENCE OF THE FOLLOWING PATTERN (in this case xxx)

j0sh

hehe thank you very much, sfullman! i think your answer is exactly what i'm looking for. 🙂

have a great time!