preg_match question

[theaffiliatedrea]

I am working on the trade doubler feed for dialaphone, it contains the field moreinfo which contains all none tradedoubler standard fields, for example

Line Rental: 45.00; Manufacturer: Nokia; Tariff: Video, Talk&Text 1100 - 600 Xnet Mins 400 Texts; ContractMinTerm: 12; Network: Three; Model: MPN

I am trying to pull the Tariff using the following preg_match

PHP Code:

$str = "Line Rental: 45.00; Manufacturer: Nokia; Tariff: Video, Talk&Text 1100 - 600  Xnet Mins 400 Texts; ContractMinTerm: 12; Network: Three; Model: MPN";

$do = preg_match("/Tariff: (.*)(; [A-Z])/", $str, $matches); 


This returns "Video, Talk&Text 1100 - 600 Xnet Mins 400 Texts; ContractMinTerm: 12; Network: Three"

This is happening as the reg ex is taking the last instance of "; [A-Z]" rather than the first.

Anyone know how this can be done?

[dmorison]

Hi,

That's happening because Perl regular expressions are "Greedy" by default - they try to match as much text as possible within the rules. You can make your expression "Ungreedy" by adding the "U" qualifier to the end, so the following code should work as required:

PHP Code:

$str = "Line Rental: 45.00; Manufacturer: Nokia; Tariff: Video, Talk&Text 1100 - 600  Xnet Mins 400 Texts; ContractMinTerm: 12; Network: Three; Model: MPN";

$do = preg_match("/Tariff: (.*)(; [A-Z])/U", $str, $matches);