php preg_match_all - exclude some matches

Hello. Is this php group JUST for development progress for PHP ? or can we ask questions here ? it's the only PHP forum I'm on. I've used preg_match quite a bit, but am unfamiliar with preg_match_all. Ive not started yet, but I'm going to design a script with a 500Kb input text-file, which i want to use preg_match_all on. Q. i guess 500Kb in a HTML form in $_POST format isn't too much ? Is it Ok ? In development, I'm going to scan through the data/array & see the lines Ive captured for possible exclude text, but even looking at the raw data, I see lines I want to EXCLUDE from the results. In the live version, I'll use it but have some excluded patterns. I have these example lines I want to exclude. (inner patterns). "type":"WORD1" "type":"WORD2" "type":"WORD3" Q. Is there a way to use preg_match_all to extract text by an outer preg criteria, but if the extracted text also matches one of the chosen inner-patterns, it is NOT included in the results. Can I do this in one go ? Or will I need to do a foreach loop in the results to exclude / remove any unwanted sub-patterns after. I'm not sure yet, but I expect the "wanted" text to be 10-20% of the original text. -- Gordon.