Posted by Richard Levasseur on 07/06/06 18:48

crescent_au@yahoo.com wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> I've been trying unsuccessfully to get the text from html page. Html
> tag that I'm interested in looks like this:
>
> <a class=link
> href="http://www.something.com/_something.php?type=cart">Shopping
> Cart</a>
> <div><em class=newentry><a href=http://nothing.com>New
> Age</a></em></div>
>
> >From the above tag, I want to extract "Shopping Cart". I'm not very
> good with RE. I tried this:
> $lines = file_get_contents("http://theabovetag.com/page.html");
> preg_match_all("/(<a\ class\=link\ href\=(.*)>)(<\/a>)/", $lines,
> $matches1);
>
> The above RE gives me "Shopping Cart" plus "New Age" as well. I just
> want "Shopping Cart". What am I doing wrong? My RE is somehow ignoring
> </a> tag right after Shopping Cart and instead accepting </a> after New
> Age. Please help!

It most likely has to do with the greediness of *. Regular expressions
will match the *longest* possible string. To prevent this, use '?'.
given the string: "<a>text</a>more</a>"
<a>.*</a> matches "<a>text</a>more</a>"
<a>.*?</a> matches "<a>text</a>"

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