In my regex, I want to say that within the sample text, any characters are allowed, including a-z in upper and lower case, numbers and special characters.
For example, my regular expression may be checking that a document is html. therefore:
"/\n<html>[]+</html>\n/"
i have tried []+ but it does not seem to like this?
Using [XXX]+ means any character that's between [ and ], one or more than one time.
Here, you didn't put any character between [ and ] -- hence the problem.
If you want to say "any possible character", you can use a .
Note : by default, it will not match newlines ; you'll have to play with Pattern Modifiers if you want it to.
If you want to say any letter, you can use :
[a-z][A-Z][a-zA-Z]And, for numbers :
[0-9] : any digit[a-zA-Z0-9] : any lower-case or upper-case letter, and any number.
At that point, you will probably want to take a look at :
\w meta-character, which means "any word character"
After that, when you'll begin using a regex such as
/.+/s
which should match :
You'll see that it doesn't "stop" when you expect it too -- that's because matching is greedy, by default -- you'll have to use a ? after the +, or use the U modifier ; see the Repetition section, for more informations.
Well, actually, the best thing to do would be to invest some time, carefully reading everything in the PCRE Patterns section of the manual, if you want to start working with regexes ;-)
Oh, and, BTW : using regex to parse HTML is a bad idea...
It's generally much better to use a DOM Parser, such as :