please explain regular expression

[priti]

/\b\W(damn|sloop|noway|nowhere)\W\b/i

what all possible values it will match and if some can explain me what it does will be great help.

What i understand if your string match any of the word given in list it should match.

b\b is for word boundary but enthu to know why \W is added ?

[wibble wobble]

We cant tell "why \W is added" -- it could be there for any reason depending on what its meant to do.

\W is any "non-word" character, as the manual says:
http://uk2.php.net/manual/en/referen...ern.syntax.php
http://www.regular-expressions.info/php.html

[decowski]

\W is a non-word character and is redundant here (if the regex is supposed to match what I think it's supposed to match).

\b doesn't match any character. It matches between word character and non-word character.

[priti]

Hi agree with you decowski i think if i re-write this expression simply /\b(damn|sloop|noway|nowhere)\b/i

it will match

sbc damn
sloop away
out to noway

right??

[decowski]

That's correct. If you leave the \W in then it will match the spaces surrouning the words as well.

[priti]

$pattern = '/<Insurers>(.*)<\/Insurers\>/';
preg_match_all($pattern, $xml, $matches);

print_r($matches);

i have a xml string from which i want to extract all <insurer> in different part of string..
.
.
.
<xs:schema id="Insurers" xmlns="" xmlnss="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema" xmlns:msdata="urn:schemas-microsoft-comml-msdata">
</xs:schema>
- <diffgr:diffgram xmlns:msdata="urn:schemas-microsoft-comml-msdata" xmlns:diffgr="urn:schemas-microsoft-comml-diffgram-v1">
<Insurers>
<Insurer diffgr:id="Insurer10" msdata:rowOrder="0">
<insurer>AdfgfA</insurer>
</Insurer>
<Insurer diffgr:id="Insurer20" msdata:rowOrder="1">
<insurer>AEdfgg</insurer>
</Insurer>
<Insurer diffgr:id="Insurer30" msdata:rowOrder="2">
<insurer>345345</insurer>
</Insurer>
</Insurers>
.
.


i want only

<Insurers>
<Insurer diffgr:id="Insurer10" msdata:rowOrder="0">
<insurer>AdfgfA</insurer>
</Insurer>
<Insurer diffgr:id="Insurer20" msdata:rowOrder="1">
<insurer>AEdfgg</insurer>
</Insurer>
<Insurer diffgr:id="Insurer30" msdata:rowOrder="2">
<insurer>345345</insurer>
</Insurer>
</Insurers>

how can i do this??


.

[felgall]

That's a totally different question. Why didn't you start your own thread, it has nothing to do with the question in this one.