Evil Regex Question

[zingbats]

Heya!

I'm tring to use the pattern to recursively go through tags. The problem is, it's lazy and for some reason not using the recursive part to expand to the furthest tag it can. Can you offer an insight into why / how to fix it?

Cheers:

'/<([a-z^{\s]+)>(([><]+)|(?3))*<\/\1>/i'}

example string:

<tag><taga>hey<b>howdy</b></taga></tag>

[NogDog]

I'm not sure I'm up to solving the regex right now, but if the purpose is to parse the text into its structure and content, I'd probably just use the DOM functions.

[zingbats]

I considered this, but I'd rather know the theory of recursive regex in general, incase there's a boundary that isn't XML based for the DOM to format.