Question

How do I negate a set of characters together in Regular Expression? Ex: [^</a>] (When you find stop matching)
when I do this way the code stops when it finds an “a” in the text

How do I do to negate a set of characters

This is the expression:

$string = "<a href='asdasd'>lalalala</a>";
preg_match('/<a href=.*?>([^<\/a>]+)/',$string,$res);

Answer 1

As simpler alternative to an assertion one could just match text content, stop at tag delimiters:

 preg_match('/<a href=.*?>([^<>]+)/', $string, $res);