Multiple lines and preg_match

Good day!

I've got a small problem to solve, I couldn't get preg_match to work with multiple lines, here's the code:

<?php
$page = '<td class="top40txt3" align="left"><strong>Alejandro</strong></td> 
        <td class="top40txt3" align="left">Lady GaGa</td>';
preg_match('!<td class="top40txt3" align="left"><strong>(.+?)</strong><td class="top40txt3" align="left">(.+?)</td>!sm',$page,$matches);
print_r($matches);
?>

PHP:

I've tried all possible modifiers, but I always get zero output. Also tried quite a bit of Googling with no luck.

Thanks for the time

 

you have missed

</td>(.+?)

PHP:

for td closing tag and newline + spaces/tabs

 

<?php
$page = '<td class="top40txt3" align="left"><strong>Alejandro</strong></td>
        <td class="top40txt3" align="left">Lady GaGa</td>';
preg_match('~<td class="top40txt3" align="left"><strong>(.+?)</strong></td>\s*<td class="top40txt3" align="left">(.+?)</td>~', $page, $matches);
print_r($matches);
?>

PHP:

 

Thank you atxsurf and danx10, problem is actually solved!
I'm going to investigate what I did wrong myself.

 

Where-ever their was a new line; replace it with \s*

 

Or with \s+
But thank you very much guys!

 

You could also use the s modifier so the that the dot metacharacter in the pattern matches everything, including newlines.

 

I see, that worked as well, but, I'm a little confused about the "ungreedy" thing. I had a 248 patterns to match.
.+? with modifier s works
.+ with modifier s does not work (only matches the first pattern)

\s+? with no modifier works
\s+ with no modifier works

Ungreedy pattern consumes as few characters as possible.
Greedy pattern consumes as many characters as possible. It is because it is "greedy".
- Source

So, there has to be some sort of logic inside it...

 

The link you've given explains it pretty well. Here's my explanation:

<?php
    // our string
    $string = "It's colder than a penguin's bollocks";
    
    // non greedy will match everything up to the first apostrophe
    if (preg_match("/^(.*?)\'/", $string, $match))
        echo 'Non-Greedy: ' . $match[1];
        
    echo '<br />';
    
    // greedy will match everything up to the last apostrophe
    if (preg_match("/^(.*)\'/", $string, $match))
        echo 'Greedy: ' . $match[1];
?>

PHP:

 

These make much more sense, got it now, thanks a lot Deacalion!