Home/ Questions/Q 8191447
In Process

The Archive Base Latest Questions

Editorial Team
  • 0
Asked: 2026-06-07T03:55:18+00:00

I’m trying to use this reg exp in PHP in a preg_match_all /\d+ (?:<[^>]+>)(?:<[^>]+>)(\S+.*\S+)(?:<[^>]+>)\s*(\S+)

  • 0

I’m trying to use this reg exp in PHP in a preg_match_all

/\d+ (?:<[^>]+>)(?:<[^>]+>)(\S+.*\S+)(?:<[^>]+>)\s*(\S+) (?:L|R)\s*\w* \w*\s*(?:\w+\s*){14}(\d+)\s*(\d)\s*(\d*\xA0*\d{3}\xA0*\d{3})/is

There’s some data sample :

38 <A NAME="Philip McRae"><A HREF="xtrastats.html#Philip McRae">Philip McRae</A>            C L  OK    58 71 69 49 33 89 71 45 48 69 50 35 32 61   21   3    787 000
43 <A NAME="Alexander Nikulin"><A HREF="xtrastats.html#Alexander Nikulin">Alexander Nikulin</A>       C L  OK    41 68 71 40 28 90 67 29 31 60 31 37 34 50   26   0      0 000 <a href="http://www.hockeydb.com/ihdb/stats/pdisplay.php?pid=78680" target="_blank">HDB</a>
20 <A NAME="Christian Hanson"><A HREF="xtrastats.html#Christian Hanson">Christian Hanson</A>        C R  OK    57 72 71 54 33 79 70 42 45 71 46 40 36 60   25   1    875 000 <a href="http://www.hockeydb.com/ihdb/stats/pdisplay.php?pid=73824" target="_blank">HDB</a>

I got around 1500 lines.

I need to match this :

Philip McRae, C, 21, 3, 787 000 (Name, Position, Age, Contract Lenght, Salary)

Each time I run my code, I got an Fatal error: Maximum execution time of 30 seconds exceeded error.

After some search I add this line at top of my script but that’s not solve my problem

ini_set("pcre.backtrack_limit",10000000);

Anyone can help me with this reg exp for some optimisation ?

Regards.

Patrick

Share

Leave an answer

You must login to add an answer.

Need An Account,

1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    I will not attempt to rewrite your regular expression since we do not have the requirements, but the main issue here is your name group:

    (\S+.*\S+)

    The .* is greedy. Meaning it will consume as much as it can including what you’re expecting the rest of your expression to match, and it doesn’t stop there. Since you have the /s pattern modifier, the dot will also match newlines, allowing .* to consume the entire file before trying to match \S and beginning its long backtracking journey.

    One solution is to make the .* lazy with ?, i.e. .*? but since you know the name is contained within an element you can simply use a negated character class for the entire group:

    ([^<]*)

    That should fix your issue, but you probably do not want to be using the /s pattern modifier in this case or you should at least add beginning and end of line anchors to your pattern. You should also try to limit your use of *.

    Please see:
    Catastrophic backtracking and
    Watch out for greediness

    • 0