Question

I am using a Regular Expression to perform a find and replace with dreamweaver. I am running into some difficulty. This is what I have in my page (note that there is a syntax error because I need an additional parenthesis at the end of the string).

$email=htmlspecialchars(mysql_real_escape_string($_POST['email']);      
$name=htmlspecialchars(mysql_real_escape_string($_POST['name']);    

I am trying to performa a find and replace that will produce this:

$email=htmlspecialchars(mysql_real_escape_string($_POST['email']));                                                    
$name=htmlspecialchars(mysql_real_escape_string($_POST['name']));

This is what I am using to perform the find. It seems to be replacing too much text (it starts with the $_POST from the $email variable, but continues all the way down to the $_POST for the $name variable)

• Find: \$_POST[‘([^<]*)’]
• Replace: $_POST[‘$1’])

I end up with this:

$email=htmlspecialchars(mysql_real_escape_string($_POST['email']);      
$name=htmlspecialchars(mysql_real_escape_string($_POST['name']));   

As you can see, it only fixes the last instance (this is because the find function is selecting both lines from $_POST[’email’] all the way to $_POST[‘name’]). Any ideas on how to fix this? Thank you!

Answer 1

Add a question mark to make it non-greedy. Also, you need to escape the [ and ] characters that you want to match.

Find: \$_POST\['([^<]*?)'\]
Replace: $_POST['$1'])

Or, alternatively, user a ‘ character instead of a < character to match the value within the quotes:

Find: \$_POST\['([^']*)'\]
Replace: $_POST['$1'])