help with preg_match

I'm trying to match a section of a url up until the & symbol within the url

so say the url is

www.something.com&src=filename.jpg&size=200

I'm trying to get just the filename.jpg

So I try

preg_match('/www.something.com&src= (.*) &/');

but it doesn't match it.

Is it soemthing to do with the &? I have tried \ it but nothing.

Thanks

 

Why not use a pattern like:

/src=(.*?)&/

Code (markup):

Jay

 

ok I am quite a newbie to php - what does the ? mean in the (.*?)

Thanks for helping

 

It basically means, match everything up until you reach &. (.*) would match everything, ignoring the & and continuing to the end of the string.

Jay

 

ok, I understand, but what would define the end of the string with (.*) ? would that mean it would keep searching through the entire page - assuming the url I was matching was within the source of a webpage?

Can you recommend anywhere that I can find further reading on the topic as searching google for such things as (.*?) etc brings up anything but relevant results?

Thanks a lot

 

www.regular-expressions.info/tutorial.html
www.codeproject.com/KB/dotnet/regextutorial.aspx

 

Wow - that is fantastic - thanks a lot

 

This one is recommendable too: www.phpvideotutorials.com/regex/

 

I'm still really stuck with this:

I managed to get it to pick something - but in the source code there were several instances of

/src=(.*?)&/

Code (markup):

and it just returned a single number. So I went back a bit on the url and found enough info to make it unique however parts of this fell on different lines within the source code and I guess this is causing it not to match.

So my questions are - what happens if preg_match matches more than one instance within the code and can I limit it to match only the first instance?

And is it possible to match data that falls over several lines of source code?

Thanks a lot

 

Use preg_match_all to match more than one, and put 's' after the final / so it becomes /s to match more than one line.

Jay

 

ok, so I can't see where I am going wrong with this

/<div id="product-image"><img src="\/resize.php?subject=product&src=(.*?)&w=200/s

Code (markup):

and here is the source:

<div id="product-image">
					<img src="/resize.php?subject=product&amp;src=b64db4d4c1108080d0d731782fcd6634.jpg&amp;w=200&amp;h=200&amp;type=thumb-full"

Code (markup):

and I am trying to get

b64db4d4c1108080d0d731782fcd6634.jpg

Code (markup):

I have tried both

 & and &

Code (markup):

and it would seem & is something that at least gets a result

Am I being totally stupid here and missing something obvious?

 

just as an update - I was being stupid in other ways - when I was wiritng the data tot he database I was accidentally restricting it to one character.

Thanks for the help anyways but all sorted