preg_replace to select a bunch of text

[mac_gabe]

Hi, I have a page of html and I'm trying to use preg_replace to select a bunch of text out of the whole page.

I've done it successfully once, to select some other text off that page, but in this example I end up selecting everything (i.e. too much).

 

My source html page looks something like this

a bunch of html
<a href="category-accentors.php" class="blog-category-link-enabled">Accentors (2)</a><br />
<a href="category-african-barbets.php" class="blog-category-link-enabled">African Barbets (3)</a><br />
...loads more links and a few divs...
<a href="category-xenops.php" class="blog-category-link-enabled">Xenops (2)</a><br />
more html

 

I want to select everything from

<a href="category-accentors.php" ...
to
... Xenops (2)</a><br />

and discard the rest and place it in a new php/html page. The (2) after Xenops is a variable number.

 

This is the preg_replace pattern I'm using:

$pattern_eng_bird_cat= '/\<a href="category-accentors\.php"(.*?)Xenops \((\d+)\)\<\/a\>\<br \/\>/';
$replace_eng_bird_cat= '<a href="category-accentors.php"$1Xenops ($2)</a><br />';
$eng_bird_cat= preg_replace($pattern_eng_bird_cat, $replace_eng_bird_cat, $categories); // should return list of English bird names and links from Accentors to Xenops
echo $eng_bird_cat;

 

I'm new to this and have tried searching and following as many links as poss but just can't work out where I'm going wrong. Any help gratefully received.

 

[mac_gabe]

Oh wait - I think I've just seen a problem. I forgot to put something in the pattern to search for the unwanted html.

 

Now I've got:

$pattern_eng_bird_cat= '/(.*?)\<a href="category-accentors\.php"(.*?)Xenops \((\d+)\)\<\/a\>\<br \/\>(.*?)/';
$replace_eng_bird_cat= '<a href="category-accentors.php"$2Xenops ($3)</a><br />';

 

which is slightly better - it excludes the initial unwanted html - but still returns the final unwanted html.

 

[mac_gabe]

I've removed the variable number to simplify things. This still doesn't work (it returns everything after Xenops, in addition to everything from Accentors to Xenops)

 

$pattern_eng_bird_cat= '/(.*?)\<a href="category-accentors\.php"(.*?)Xenops(.*?)/';
$replace_eng_bird_cat= '<a href="category-accentors.php"$2Xenops</a><br />';

 

[mac_gabe]

OK, I've finally worked it out. Trial and error is a wonderful thing! I removed the ? marks so (.*) instead of (.*?) and it works like a dream  I only started putting ? marks in because it worked better with them in another search, no real idea what they do or why, other than one is "greedy" and the other isn't.