Regular expression question

[Benedict White]

For reasons too long to explain, our web servers have changed version of PHP which now means we need to use regular expressions in the perl format rather than the posix. We have had major problems that have been solved but now need help with some regex. The original Posix regex was (using php function erigi which is case insensitve :

\\[table\\]([^\\[]+)\\[/table\\]

This is the input text:

[b]South Coast[/b]         <br />
[table]                                  <br />
Boat      Link        Asking Price       Lying<br />
Heritage              [url=http://www.someurl.co.uk/home/FS_heritage] 
+Detail on Heritage [/url]                      Warsash<br />
Firestorm Too    [url=http://www.someurl.co.uk/home/FirestormToo] Deta
+il on Firestorm Too [/url]                         Plymouth<br />
[/table]<br />

I need it to match on the [table] and the [/table] and extract the data inbetween, this passed to another function to construct the table.

[Neighbour]

But your current regex only matches everything between [table] and [/table] if that 'everything' does not contain a '['....which, in your example, it does.

[pvaldes]

if(/\[table\](.*?)\[\/table\]/) {print $1}

[morgon]

my ($table_data) = $input =~ /\[table\](.*?)\[\/table\]/s;

You need the "s"-modifier as the the table spans several lines.

[Benedict White]

Many thanks for that, the /s turned out to be as important as the (.*?). It works well now.

[JavaFan]

I don't like .*?.

if (m{\[table\]                          # Match [table]
      ([^[]* (?:\[(?!/table\]) [^[]*)*)  # Match a string not containi
+ng [/table]
      \[/table\]                         # Match [/table]
     }x) {print $1}