Re: pattern and infinite loop

In message <[email protected]>, no sp
am writes:
>Yes that's correct.  This pattern prevented the looping it just didn't match
>for that particular page.  I'll have to digest this pattern a bit more in my
>head :o)

Are you using contains() or match()?  If you're using match(), then
switch to contains() and it should work.  Here's my sanity check for
the pattern (to avoid having to write a Java test program):

~> wget -O - http://www.myspace.com/pain  2> /dev/null | perl -e '@txt = <STDIN>; $txt = join("", @txt); $txt =~ m#<span\s+class="nametext">[^<]*</span><br>[^<]*<font\s[^>]*><strong>([^<]+)</strong></font>#si; print "$1\n";'                                                                                                                                        Metal / Industrial

In any case, the key to prevent excessive backtracking is to make the
pattern as specific as possible.  The original pattern posed problems
because of the leading .* as well as following .+ pattern elements which
caused a lot of backtracking.