php some regex without end

Question

I am trying to learn regex and have a string, I want the beginning to be (not including)

.com/

and the end to be (not including)

">[tomato

I can make the basic regex ok, but it keeps including the tomato part in it, instead of ending just before it. So if I have

'sdf98uj3.com/sdjkh.sdf./sdf.sdf">[tomatoiosdf8uj3'

, then I want to return:

sdjkh.sdf./sdf.sdf

I am using preg_match in php. Any ideas?

If you are actually parsing URLs or HTML, regexes are not the best way to go (though they are pretty nifty for a lot of things and well worth learning). For URLs have a look at the PHP manual under parse_url or pathinfo. For HTML, have a look at SimpleXML. — dnagirl
– dnagirl, Commented Jan 31, 2011 at 17:30

Felix Kling · Accepted Answer · 2011-01-31 17:28:43Z

1

preg_match('~\.com/(.*?)">\[tomato~', $str, $match);

$match[1] contains your string. The (.*?) is a capture group that captures every character between .com/ and ">[tomato.

http://www.regular-expressions.info/ is a good start for learning regular expressions.

Could also be solved without regex, using strpos^(docs), strrpos^(docs) and substr^(docs):

$start = strpos($str, '.com/');
$end = strrpos($str, '">[tomato'); // or strpos to find the first occurance
$sub = substr($str, $start, $end-$start);

answered Jan 31, 2011 at 17:23

Felix Kling

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Comments

borayeris · Accepted Answer · 2011-01-31 17:32:16Z

0

preg_match('/(.*?)\.com/(.*?)">\[tomato(.*)/', $text, $matches);

echo $matches[2];

answered Jan 31, 2011 at 17:32

borayeris

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