PHP and PCRE: greedy or not?
After a while i came once again in touch with Regular Expressions. I needed to convert some bbcode into html but didn't want to use a prepacked library mostly because their yust to blouted for my purpose. However i strugled over a few problems, first of all it took me some time to realize that . (the dot) doesn't match new line characters ('\n') maybe should have read the documentation _before_ starting to code. This can be solved by the Patternmodifier /s. The second problem was that my RegExp matched to often against things witch it shouldn't for example i had something like this:
$text = '[url=http://sf.net]sourceforge[/url] and [url=http://freshmeat.net]
freshmeat[/url]';
$text = preg_replace(
'/\[url=(.*)\](.*)\[\/url\]/is',
'<a href="\\1">\\2</a>',
$text
);
which results in the following
<a href="http://sf.net]sourceforge[/url] and
[url=http://freshmeat.net">freshmeat</a>so what happens? My RegExp matches only the first and last url-tags and not the corresponding ones. After a while i figured out that this can be solved by the following:
$text = preg_replace(
'/\[url=(.*?)\](.*?)\[\/url\]/is',
'<a href="\\1">\\2</a>',
$text
);
The question mark changes the quantifiers to be greedy. From the PHP-Manual:
However, if a quantifier is followed by a question mark, then it ceases
to be greedy, and instead matches the minimum number of times possible.
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