Re: Regular Expression Problem

Roman Neuhauser wrote: > # rluckhurst@resmaster.com / 2007-01-25 09:27:59 +1100: >> I must be dumb as I have been battling my way through regular expression >> examples for a while and I can not work out why the following does not work >> properly. I am the first to admit that regular expressions confuse me greatly. >> >> The string is a piece of XML as follows and I have put that string into a >> variable called $xml_string >> >> >> <flights> >> <flight flightId="19417361" addAdtPrice="0.0" >> addChdPrice="0.0" addInfPrice="0.0"> >> <legXRefs> >> <legXRef legId="23862812" >> class="V"></legXRef> >> <legXRef legId="23862813" >> class="V"></legXRef> >> </legXRefs> >> </flight> >> <flight flightId="19417360" addAdtPrice="0.0" >> addChdPrice="0.0" addInfPrice="0.0"> >> <legXRefs> >> <legXRef legId="23862810" >> class="V"></legXRef> >> <legXRef legId="23862811" >> class="V"></legXRef> >> </legXRefs> >> </flight> >> </flights> >> >> >> What I am trying to do is extract the first <flight ..... /flight> chunk. <accent voice="pirate"> you be needing an ungreedy modifier on yer regex. </accent> see here: http://php.net/manual/en/reference.pcre.pattern.modifiers.php > Are you doing this to learn regular expressions or are you actually > trying to do work? Because you're going the wrong way. > It's XML, why do you treat it as text? not everyone shares that sentiment. in terms of lowest common denominator XML is also a string. then there is the question of whether it's actually marked as XML, whether there is valid DTD and whether the XML itself validates against the DTD - if any of the answers is 'no' then your looking at tag soup. there is a lot more tagsoup in this world than there is proper xml. that said it can't hurt to throw simpleXML at the problem :-) >