Re: newbie question about preg_match

From: "Al" <news@ridersite.org> > I'm trying to compose a general purpose text snip expression to extract > a text segment from a string. > > Should this work for all reasonable cases? It seems to work for several > test strings. > > $start= "str1"; > > $end= "str2"; > > preg_match ("|$start (.*) ? $end |i", $contents, $text); > > $segment= $text[1]; Looks like you have some extra spaces in there that'll mess it up. The '?' for example, is only applying to the space before it. You want preg_match("|$start(.*?)$end |i", $contents, $text); Note that this will only return one match when there could be more, depending upon your string. If you want all of them, use preg_match_all(). ---John Holmes...