Re: Regex help!

> Basically, I have a whopping great log file that I would like to parse. Each > line of the log file consists of one of 70 or so sentences. EVERY sentence > takes one of the following three forms: > > [keyword1]phrase1[keyword2]phrase2 > [keyword1]phrase1[keyword2] > [keyword1]phrase1 look at ereg(); although efficiency experts may want to chime in. how often will you be running this? (can you change "phrase1" or "phrase2" in you log format?) this not-entirely-elegant snippet should work: if ( ereg("(.*)phrase1(.*)phrase2", $input, $regs) ) { /* then we matched case 1; $regs[1] will contain phrase 1; $regs[2] -> phrase2 ".*" -V the "." means any character; the "*" means zero or more times. i am assuming that php does greedy matches, in that the ".*" will suck up as much text as possible. if you need to force it to the beginning of the line, use a "^" at the very beginning of the regexp; a "$" will do the same for end-of-line when placed at the end of the regexp. */ } elseif ( ereg("(.*)phrase1(.*)", $input, $regs) ) { /* then we matched case 2 or 3; $regs[1] will contain phrase 1. */ } best, jeff