Re: Parsing

On 23-2-2015 7:18, Jigar Dhulla wrote:

Hi, (.*?) - Any character (\s*?) - Multiline spaces and tabs

First (Ron, Jigar), PLEASE don't top-post. The mailinglist rules state that you should BOTTOM POST instead. Try to keep to the rules on the php mailinglists; always. Secondly, the above two regexp rules are slightly bloated. What they actually mean is: ( = start new catchable pattern . = any character * = 0 or more of the previous pattern ? = 0 or 1 of the previous pattern ) = end catchable pattern \s = any whitespace character So, what does (.*?) mean? Well, simply said "any character, occuring 0 or more times" occuring 0 or 1 times. But since the any character pattern already occurs 0 or more times, the pattern as a whole will either be matched (1 time) or not (0 times). Making the ? metacharacter useless. Now if it were (.+?) then it would state "one or more of any character, with the entire pattern optional. So in practice, the following patterns are equal in what they represent: (.*?), (.*), (.+?) The same thing goes for \s*? You can read up on Regular Expressions on http://www.php.net/manual/en/regexp.introduction.php - Tul --- This email has been checked for viruses by Avast antivirus software. http://www.avast.com