Regex on multiple lines?

FULLAHiMHARD

Hi there,

I am using preg_match across multiple lines. It is working fine, but I have run into an issue where it does not know where to stop.

This is the text I want to retrieve:

<td class="details_header" width="100px" valign="top" nowrap="nowrap">prod</td><td>data1
											<br />
											data2 <br />
											data3 <br />

</td>

The code I am using is:

preg_match('|<td class="details_header" width="100px" valign="top" nowrap="nowrap">prod</td><td>(.*)</td>|ims', $content, $match1);

but it will go right till the end of the html file.

Any ideas?

Many thanks!

nrg_alpha

What is important to understand is that the . is a dot_match_all that matches everything (except newlines) by default. So, (.*) is greedy by nature and wants to match as much as it can.

I think what you may be looking for is changing (.*) to (.+?) to make it lazy. This way, once it matches up to < followed by / then t, then d, then >, it will stop:

preg_match('|<td class="details_header" width="100px" valign="top" nowrap="nowrap">prod</td><td>color=red[/color]</td>|ims', $content, $match1);

And of course, you will want to use match1[1] for your desired captured result.

EDIT - On a side note, I find $match1 to be a strange variable name, as I would simply use $match and thus access $match[1]... but that's just my opinion.