On 23-2-2015 7:18, Jigar Dhulla wrote:
Hi,
(.*?) - Any character
(\s*?) - Multiline spaces and tabs
First (Ron, Jigar), PLEASE don't top-post. The mailinglist rules state
that you should BOTTOM POST instead. Try to keep to the rules on the php
mailinglists; always.
Secondly, the above two regexp rules are slightly bloated. What they
actually mean is:
( = start new catchable pattern
. = any character
* = 0 or more of the previous pattern
? = 0 or 1 of the previous pattern
) = end catchable pattern
\s = any whitespace character
So, what does (.*?) mean? Well, simply said "any character, occuring 0
or more times" occuring 0 or 1 times. But since the any character
pattern already occurs 0 or more times, the pattern as a whole will
either be matched (1 time) or not (0 times). Making the ? metacharacter
useless. Now if it were (.+?) then it would state "one or more of any
character, with the entire pattern optional.
So in practice, the following patterns are equal in what they represent:
(.*?), (.*), (.+?)
The same thing goes for \s*?
You can read up on Regular Expressions on
http://www.php.net/manual/en/regexp.introduction.php
- Tul
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