Question

I have an html file that has a table of information and I’m trying to extract specific columns. The pattern is like this with alternating “TableDarkRow” and “TableLightRow”:

'>817338284254611</A></td><td Class='TableDarkRow' NOWRAP> 01/14/2011</td>

And I’m trying to extract an array of number and date pairs :

817338284254611
01/14/2011

I tried and came up with this:

>([0-9])+</A>(.*)NOWRAP> ?([0-9]{2}\/[0-9]{2}\/[0-9]{4})

But the (.*) is allowing the entire document to be selected between the first and last occurrences.

Answer 1

Replace the .* with .*? for non-greedy matching.

Reference: Watch Out for The Greediness!