preg_match_all and general characters

what does preg_match_all("/<option\svalue\s='([^']+)'>([^>]+)<\/option>/", $txt, $rs);
do?

I understand it matches the pattern but what is all the extra back slashes, '\s', '([^', etc. mean.

thanks for any help!

 

\s is any whitespace character. See the PCRE Escape sequences page in the PHP manual for a list http://nz.php.net/manual/en/regexp.reference.escape.php

[^']+ says one or more characters that are not apostrophes. It's fairly standard for regular expression syntaxes and is probably documented in a page close to the one above

HTH

Bruce

 

so assuming that $txt=<option value='423122' >Della 1</option>

would this be the expected array:
$rs[0]=<option value='423122' >Della 1</option>
$rs[1]=value='423122' >Della 1</option>
$rs[2]=='423122' >Della 1</option>
$rs[3]=423122' >Della 1</option>

I am not sure what the rest would be

 

Try this

<?php
$txt="<option value='423122' >Della 1</option>";
$rs=array();
$pat="/<option\s+value\s*=\s*'([^']+)'[^>]*>([^<]*)<\/option>/";
print "preg_match\n";
print preg_match( $pat, $txt, $rs ) . " ";
print $txt . "\n";
print_r( $rs );
print "\n\n";
print "preg_match_all\n";
print preg_match_all( $pat, $txt, $rs ) . " ";
print $txt . "\n";
print_r( $rs );

Code (markup):

Output

preg_match
1 <option value='423122' >Della 1</option>
Array
(
    [0] => <option value='423122' >Della 1</option>
    [1] => 423122
    [2] => Della 1
)


preg_match_all
1 <option value='423122' >Della 1</option>
Array
(
    [0] => Array
        (
            [0] => <option value='423122' >Della 1</option>
        )

    [1] => Array
        (
            [0] => 423122
        )

    [2] => Array
        (
            [0] => Della 1
        )

)

Code (markup):

Neither of these are exactly your expected output. The preg_match output seems to be closer to it than the preg_match.

HTH

Bruce

 

I see you have changed the pattern alittle to make it work. thanks for your help!

 

Yes,

Sorry I forgot to mention that I'd done that.

I got carried away with finding out what the differences were between the output of preg_match_all and preg_match and by the time I wrote up my results it had slipped my mind that I'd had to debug the pattern at the start of the process.

I hope it didn't take you too long to work out that I'd changed it.

Bruce