Question

can anyone explain the meaning behind this regular expression?

'/<div align="left"><a href="(.*?)">(.*?)<\/a><\/div>/s'

from what i know it is search for all div align tags that equal left
but for the next part I am lost.

Answer 1

Irrespective of whatever this is for and whether it’ll work or not (regex is not an option to match html tags), for the sake of explaining, the second part of the regex <a href="(.*?)">(.*?)<\/a><\/div>/s is just “trying” to match all the anchor tags with any url followed by the text which will contain that url.

When I saying “trying”, this is what the person who wrote the regex inteded to do.