(.*) instead of (.*?)
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by EBAGHAKI
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Published on 2010-04-07T11:16:59Z
Indexed on
2010/04/07
11:23 UTC
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Suppose we have this html content, and we are willing to get Content1, Content2,.. with regular expression.
<li>Content1</li>
<li>Content2</li>
<li>Content3</li>
<li>Content4</li>
If I use the line below
preg_match_all('/<li>(.*)<\/li>/', $text, $result);
i will get an array with a single row containing:
Content1</li>
<li>Content2</li>
<li>Content3</li>
<li>Content4
And by using this code:
preg_match_all('/<li>(.*?)<\/li>/', $text, $result);
i will get an array with 4 row containing Content1, Content2, ...
Why (.*) is not working since it means match any character zero or more times
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