Question

Consider the two following regular expression snippets and dummy HTML that it should be matching:

Apparently, I can only post one link until I get more reputation, so the link below contains the three links I referenced above:

http://pastebin.com/Qj1uxfdk

The difference between the two snippets, if anyone is wondering, is a removed (((.{2,20}?), (.{2,20}?))?) about half-way through the snippet.

The first snippet does not match the text, but the second one does, and I cannot figure out why. I tried putting a dummy expression that should match anything in its place (such as (.{1})?) and it still fails to match it, but when I remove it, it suddenly matches again.

I’ve been toiling with this stupid expression for the last 4 hours and I’m about at my wits’ end. Can anybody help?

Answer 1

It was a bit easier to rewrite it than to debug it, so here’s my approach :

preg_match_all(
    '%<tr>[^<]*
      <td[^>]*><a.*?employee_id=(\d*).*?>(\w*)\s*.*?&nbsp;</td>[^<]*
      <td[^>]*>(\w*),\s*(\w*).*?&nbsp;</td>[^<]*
      <td[^>]*>(\w*).*?&nbsp;</td>[^<]*
      <td[^>]*>(\w*).*?&nbsp;</td>[^<]*
      <td[^>]*>(\w*).*?&nbsp;</td>[^<]*
      <td[^>]*>(\w*).*?&nbsp;</td>[^<]*
      <td[^>]*>(\w*).*?&nbsp;</td>[^<]*
      <td[^>]*><a[^>]*>(.*?)</a>.*?&nbsp;</td>[^<]*
      <td[^>]*>(\d{3}\.\d{3}\.\d{4}).*?&nbsp;</td>[^<]*
      <td[^>]*>(\w*).*?&nbsp;</td>[^<]*
    </tr>%sx', 
    $subject, $result, PREG_SET_ORDER);

It works for your example and you can tweak it if you like more or less validation.