Question

notice the change in $pattern

$subject = '<table width="750"  style="padding-left:150px;"><tr><td width="108"class="fieldname">First Name:</td><td width="381" class="fieldname">';

    $pattern = '/(table)/';
    $matches = array();
    echo preg_match( $pattern, $subject, $matches)."<br/>";
    echo $matches[0]."<br/>";

gives me output

1
table

AND prefixing table by < in $pattern gives me output

1

WHY ?? shouldn’t i get < table as ouput ?

Answer 1

You get it, but you don’t see it(it’s HTML-markup and the browser tries to render a table).

Use

 echo htmlentities($matches[0])."<br/>";

…to inspect the matches.