Re: The difference between ereg and preg?

Jochem Thank you for your continued assistance.

^--- remove the caret as you dont want to only match when the line starts with <li> (the <li> can be anywhere on the line) Ah, I get it now. I was confused about the meaning of the caret.

I'll assume you also have the mb extension setup. Yes, I do.

This regular expression is tricky stuff, and its behaviour is not what I'd expect. After much experimentation, I discovered that I needed to take the last "s" out of my syntax. This was the "s" that states that the search could span across line breaks. I assumed that the behaviour would be to start at one instance of <li> and continue until the first instance of <br> and extract that as a variable. And then start again at the next instance of <li> and so on. But instead it seems to be starting from the extreme outside and work it's way inwards from both ends, thus trapping all text between the very first <li> in the source string, and the very last <br> in the source. So if the "s" option is on to span across lines, then it gets only one match for the whole HTML document, containing everything between the very first <li> and the very last <br>. If I take off the "s" option, then it only looks at <li> and <br> tags within each line, thus returning small, discreet matches. I personally don't think this is very rational behaviour, so either I'm doing something wrong still, or perhaps it's me who isn't very rational. Either is likely. -- Dave M G