On Mon, 3 Mar 2003 19:51:09 -0500, you wrote:
>preg_match_all('/begincommand(.*)endcommand/',$messagebody,$commandOuttake,P
>REG_PATTERN_ORDER);
[...]
> How
>do I change the criteria to stop at the first instance of a match? How do I
>parse out only up to the first instance of "endcommand"?
Here's an excerpt from 'perldoc perlre':
By default, a quantified subpattern is "greedy", that is, it will
match as many times as possible (given a particular starting location)
while still allowing the rest of the pattern to match. If you want it
to match the minimum number of times possible, follow the quantifier
with a "?". Note that the meanings don't change, just the
"greediness".
As John Holmes has already pointed out, you can add the U modifier,
but I would recommend that you learn to use the ? quantifier, since
this is more portable as Perl doesn't recognize the U modifier. So
you'd want to change this:
/begincommand(.*)endcommand/
to this:
/begincommand(.*?)endcommand/
If you have an install of Perl handy I also recommend taking a look at
'perldoc perlretut', I've found it very helpful.
HTH...
--
PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/)
To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
