Hi,
I discovered something odd here. I note that the following expression will find multiple ending square brackets and I can't seem to stop this with a ? after '\]?'
<!\[CDATA\[(.+)\]>
So for instance this will find:
<![CDATA[Eastborne Marina]>
<![CDATA[Eastborne Marina]]>
<![CDATA[Eastborne Marina]]]]]>
Setting is Posix btw.
Not sure I understand why this is happening as it wouldn't with other chars
Can someone explain why \] appears to be a special case?
Can someone explain this
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ben_josephs
- Posts: 2461
- Joined: Sun Mar 02, 2003 9:22 pm
It isn't a special case, and \] doesn't match more than one bracket.
The repetition operators are greedy: they match as much as possible (while not preventing their containing regular expressions from matching). So the subexpression .+ matches as many characters as possible, so long as there is a ]> following. That is, the .+ in your regex matches everything between the [ and the last ].
Try
<!\[CDATA\[([^]]+)\]>
The repetition operators are greedy: they match as much as possible (while not preventing their containing regular expressions from matching). So the subexpression .+ matches as many characters as possible, so long as there is a ]> following. That is, the .+ in your regex matches everything between the [ and the last ].
Try
<!\[CDATA\[([^]]+)\]>