[Resolved] regex help ... this should be pretty easy

zeb

I need a pcre regex that will match anything inbetween a closing </pre> tag and an opening <pre> tag... anything that isn't only whitespace.

For example, it needs to match this:

</pre>
stuff here
and maybe here
<pre>

but it can't match this:

</pre>
<pre>

I'm having a devil of a time.

Drakla

Not saying it's perfect, but try

$pat = '</pre>\s*(\S+)\s*<pre>Us';

That gives the option of some whitespace either side of some non whitespace, the U makes it ungreedy in preg_match_all so you can grab what's between them in index [1] of returned matches when using

preg_match_all ( $pat, $data, $matches );

zeb

It doesn't work for me... I'm not using preg_match_all (nor do I need to capture anything) because I only need to find out IF there is anything other than only whitespace in-between the tags:

$data = "</pre>
stuff here
and maybe here
<pre>";

if ( preg_match( '#</pre>\s*\S+\s*<pre>#s', $data, $matches ) )
	{
	echo "IT MATCHES: '{$matches[0]}'";
	}
else
	{
	echo "NO MATCH";
	}
// outputs "NO MATCH"

It seems to be stopping at the first space after 'stuff'... as you can see if you change the pattern to '#</pre>\s*\S+#s'

What makes it difficult, I suppose, is that the stuff in-between the tags is likely to contain multiple lines... and the \S trips up on the spaces in the lines. We need to find a way to find "anything BUT ONLY whitespace" which is different that "anything but whitespace".

Drakla

</pre>(\s(\S+)\s)+<pre>

try that, with preg_match, think it might be a winner

zeb

That doesn't work either.

Drakla

I tested it locally and it worked fine - paste in some text where it doesn't work and I'll see what needs changing.

You did use it with the s option, yeah? I didn't bother pasting the extras back in

#</pre>(\s(\S+)\s)+<pre>#s

zeb

Ahhh! it does work! I must have mistyped something, or misread the pattern. It was a while ago, so I don't remember. But anyway, thank you! 🙂