忽略换行符的正则表达式

Question

I am not very good at regular expressions.

I have various files that have a repeated string inside them:

$find = "><script contentType=\"application/x-javascript\"
>

if(event.target.hostContainer)";

But sometimes instead of the 2 you can see in the above string, there is sometimes 3 or 1. Granted, it's a stupid problem to have to overcome but unfortuantely the file is a pdf... soo i don't have control over its output.

How might i go about searching for the above string while ignoring the .

The context of my question is:

$file = file_get_contents('pdfs/another1.pdf');
$find = "><script contentType=\"application/x-javascript\"
>

if(event.target.hostContainer)";

$replace = "whatever bla bla";

$output_str = str_replace($find, $replace, $file);

Answer 1

For one thing, str_replace doesn't use regular expressions for the search string. The correct function is preg_replace.

Here's a regex that works in this case:

$find = '#><script contentType="application/x-javascript"\s*>\s*if\(event\.target\.hostContainer\)#U';
$output_str = preg_replace($find, $replace, $file);

The regex has a lot of "\" (escape) characters because ".", "(", and ")" have special meaning in regex. The regex is enclosed in the '#' delimiter. The 'U' modifier at the end of the regex is a precaution so that if the string has more than one matching expression, each match gets replaced with the replacement.

A complete explanation of PHP regex is available here: http://us1.php.net/manual/en/reference.pcre.pattern.syntax.php