regular expression doesnt work as expected

[daneharnett]

Hi everyone,
im trying to use ereg() to match a pattern in a string.
my pattern is "(.*) (.*)"
my string is "foreach ($x as $i)"
basically i would like to get the first string up until the first 'space' char..
when i ereg these via
ereg($pattern, $string, $matches);

$matches[1] = "foreach ($x as";

i want it to only be "foreach";

can anyone help?

 

[sleipnir214]

That's because regular expressions are greedy. They are supposed to capture as much of the string as possible while fulfilling the terms of the expression. Since you basically told the regex engine, "Split the string at the space", the first "(.*)" grabbed as much as it could.

For something that simple, I wouldn't use a regular expression -- I'd just use split(). This code:

<?php
$a = 'foreach ($x as $i)';

$b = split (' ', $a, 2);

print_r ($b);
?>

Will output:

Array
(
    [0] => foreach
    [1] => ($x as $i)
)

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[vbkris]

yup or u can use the /U modifier (i use it along with preg)
preg_match_all("/(.*)\s/U", $string, $matches);

does it work?


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