regular expressions in php

[benopaul]

Hi,
In some regular expressions , I found use of (.*?) in regular expressions. From tutorials , i know use of .,* and ?. But I don't know simultaneous use of these characters. Please give an idea about its.

With thanks
Benoy

[dlite922]

Those all mean different things and not related,

a dot (.) is a character match
(*) after anything means match it zero to any number of times
(,) is a separator for a list such a{2,3} means match character a 2 or 3 times (meaning it will match aa and aaa but not "a" or aaaa ... etc.
(?) makes the preceding character optional. Te?st matches Tst and Test. the "e" is optional. e.g. Test(ing)? matches Test and Testing.

great resource: http://www.regular-expressions.info

Cheers,

Dan