Regex question

[Mr Blonde]

Hi i wasn't sure if this was the right place to put this question so please move if there is somewhere more appropriate.

I'm pretty new to regular expressions, and have written one for a dreamweaver find an replace to strip an a tag if it links out of the current sites folder...

find:

<a\s*href="../(.*)>(.*)</a>

replace:

$2

The Problem i have run into is that if there is an image inside the tag it will be deleted, or if there are two links in the one paragraph the content in between will be deleted too. It runs perfectly if the link is inside a list item for example.

I think it is because if it runs into a second '>', it assumes that is the end of the 1st tag so deletes everything from there... is there a way to make it stop at the 1st '>'? (hope that made sense... it did in my head )

thanks

[hamstu]

Yes, there is, you need to use the '?' (non-greedy) modifier.

Try this:

<a\s*href="../(.*?)>(.*?)</a>

[Mr Blonde]

Awesome thanks heaps man, works a treat

[KevinR]

if all you want is $2 you should do it like this:

<a\s*href="\.\./.*?>(.*?)</a>

then replace with $1

note the dots in the regexp should be escaped if you mean to match literal dots, otherwise each dot will match a single character of anything.

[Mr Blonde]

cool thanks for the tips kevin, good to know