On Mon, May 23, 2005 8:43 am, W Luke said: > I really struggle with regex, and would appreciate some guidance. > Basically, I have a whole load of files (HTML) which are updated every > few minutes. I need to go through each line, looking for the word > CONFIRMED: (which is always in capitals, and always superseded by a > colon). The line looks like this: > > 22.5 J.Smith at Thropton, CONFIRMED: more text here, including commas > and info on the appointment etc Is that always on ONE line? If so, you sure don't need anything as fancy as RegEx to do that. $file = file("/full/path/to/your/file.html") or die("Could not load HTML"); while (list(, $line) = each($file)){ if (strstr($line, 'CONFIRMED:')){ $parts = explode('CONFIRMED:', $line); list($before, $after) = $parts; echo "A CONFIRMED appointment!<br />\n"; echo "<p>$before</p>\n"; echo "<p>$after</p>\n"; echo "<hr />\n"; } } You may need RegEx some other day to pick out the other bits and pieces from the line... Or not. I've done a lot of scraping of data like this with just explode and strstr and substr. RegEx is great when you need it; But when you don't it's a lot of overhead and a bit of a headache. [Course, when you *DO* need RegEx it's *more* than a bit of a headache. More like a migraine :-)] -- Like Music? http://l-i-e.com/artists.htm -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php