REGEX: Grabbing everything until a specific word

Question

ex: example data in here

I want everything inside the a tag, to the end

/([^         


        

Answer 1

/<a>(.*?)<\/a>/

should work. The ? makes it lazy, so it grabs as little as possible before matching the </a> part. but using . will mean that it matches everything until it finds </a>. If you want to be able to match across lines, you can use the following if with preg_match

/<a>(.*?)<\/a>/s

The "s" at the end puts the regular expression in "single line" mode, which means the . character matches all characters including new lines. See other useful modifiers