regex pains!

[Anon]

so here is what i would love to be able to do..:

1. take a string of text
2. echo the first 200 characters
3. stop at the first . or ? or ! after the first 200 characters

im using

echo (ereg("^{.{200}*[.?!]",} $NEWS_BODY));

its not echoing anything on the page at all am i missing something??

please respond to [e-mail] if you can help thanks!

[comstar]

Ok... this was a bit tough since I didn't have any documentation on me and I haven't done regexes in a while. 🙂 BUT I have prevailed.

Perl Regex:

if (preg_match("/^{(.{200}[.\?!]*[.\?!])/",} $NEWS_BODY, $match)) {
echo $match[1];
}

print "<BR>\n";

PHP Regex (I think its POSIX, but don't quote me on that):

if (ereg("^{(.{200}[.\?!]*[.\?!])",} $NEWS_BODY, $match)) {
echo $match[1];
}

Now, if you echo or print what these regex functions return, you will not get the string, but rather the number of characters that matched it.

-Philip

[comstar]

Oh... and the regexes I wrote will match any ! ? or . after the 200th character.

-Philip

[Anon]

Well, I think you've got it pretty close...

Try this (uses Perl compatible regular expressions, which I'm more familiar with):

$found = preg_match("/^{.{0,200}.*[.?!]/U",} $NEWS_BODY, $match );
print $match[0];

Hope this helps!

-Rich