Question

i just wanna ask what this symbol .*? means in php.
here is the sample code:

    function parse($html) {
    //echo "Find table(id=weekdays)..\n";
    $pattern = "/(<table.*?id=\"weekdays\".*)/ims";
    //$pattern = "/(<div.*?id=\"flexBox_flex_calendar_mainCal\".*)/ims";
    //echo $pattern."\n";
    $match = array();
    //$html = str_replace("\r", "", $html);
    //$html = str_replace("\n", "", $html);
    if (preg_match($pattern, $html, $match) > 0) {
        //print_r($match);
        //echo $match[1];
        //echo count($match);
        $this->parseTable($match[1]);
    } else {
        echo "Error: no match calendar data(table id=weekdays) found, maybe fx.com change its site html'!\n";
    }
}

I am maintaining a website that has the function to extract the table values from another/an external website then parse it to insert on our database..

I have to change the value of $pattern but i cant since i didn’t know what does that symbols mean..

Thank you so much for the help..

Answer 1

That is a wildcard character in a regular expression.

(<table.*?id=\"weekdays\".*)

/./s means ANY character

* means 0 or more times

So /.*/s means “match any character 0 or more times”

STRING : hello , now this is some garbage , world. And this is a long sentence which ends in world

hello.*world will match this WHOLE string.

See example : http://regexr.com?334em

And /.*?/s means “match any character 0 or more times, but the non greedy match i.e. The earliest match is returned (here: a zero-length string).

/hello.*?world/s will match only hello , now this is some garbage , world as it is the smallest non-greedy match.

See same example with difference :
http://regexr.com?334ep

ims are flags i , m and s

You can read about them here: PHP: Possible modifiers in regex patterns^Docs