Question

I have a long text which contains:

city_nameLAcity_name some text here and there ;) city_nameLondoncity_name some other text will goes here too then city_nameTehrancity_name and of course some other junk text here.

I want to slurp LA, London, and Tehran from the text above. I ereg, but couldn’t get what I want I used something like below:

ereg ("city_name(.*)city_name", $longText, $output);

How to do this job? I appreciate your inputs!

Answer 1

Use (.*?) instead of (.*). The difference is that .* will match as much as possible (using the greedy quantifier *) while .*? will match as little as possible (*? is a lazy quantifier). So unless you have a city whose name includes city_name somewhere (dunno, the US has some strange names; maybe it happens) .*? should get you what you want.

Random note: This might not work with ereg, I’m not intimately familiar with extended POSIX regular expressions right now. However, those functions are deprecated in PHP for a while now (and you should get a warning about that, too). It’s better to replace them by the various preg_* functions where possible. The substitute would be preg_match_all, I believe.