[PHP-DEV] Bug #1099: Strange behaviour of regular expressions From: thifi <email protected>
Date: 01/28/99

From: thifi <email protected>
Operating system: Linux, Debian Slink, 2.2.0
PHP version: 3.0.6
PHP Bug Type: Misbehaving function
Bug description: Strange behaviour of regular expressions

There is the following line in a text file:

1.word ##test,hello### 2.word 3.word ##test2,hello###, 4.word!

I'd like to replace every ##...### enclosed characters with a string:

In perl it works like this:

#!/usr/bin/perl
open(F,"<test.txt");
while(<F>) {
        chomp;
        s/##.*?,.*?###/REPLACED/g;
        print "$_\n";
}
close(F);

output:
# ./test.pl
1.word REPLACED 2.word 3.word REPLACED, 4.word!

But in php3:

#!/usr/lib/cgi-bin/php3 -q
<?
$file = fopen("test.txt","r");
while(!feof($file)) {
        $s = chop(fgets($file,10000));
        $s = ereg_replace("##.*?,.*?###","REPLACED",$s);
        echo("$s\n");
}
fclose($file);
?>

output is:
# ./test.php3
1.word REPLACED, 4.word!

So why can't I use .*? in a regular expression function?

If I made a mistake then sorry for the report. 

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