What mean [^>] in regex preg php?

Example code:

<?php
$html = <<< html
<p><a href="http://www.google.com" title="10">google.com</a></p>
<p><a href="http://www.cade.com" title="11">cade.com</a></p>
html;

echo preg_replace('#<p><a href\="([^>]+)" title="([^>]+)">([^&开发者_StackOverflow中文版gt;]+)</a></p>#','<p>$1 - $2</p>',$html);
?>

It works fine but i would like to know what [^>] means. I know that

• + = 1 or more;
• () = subpatterns;

But I don't know about ^>

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It means any character other than >

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^, when placed at the start of a character class ([) means any character EXCEPT what's in the class.

In your code, that would mean it would match any character except >.

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It means that it should match any other character than >. It also means that the person that wrote this code and tried to parse HTML with regex didn't read the Bible and will very soon regret it.

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It means any character apart from >.

(Side note: it is not usually a good idea to use regex to parse HTML.)

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[^>] means a set of characters including all characters but >.

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You have it in the PHP documentation for PCRE regex syntax

First, you have a list of meta-characters. You can check there to find the meaning of characters in regexes.

Concerning your question we find that:

• The [ sign starts a character class definition, finished by ].
• The use of ^ as the first character of a character class negates the character class.
• > isn't a meta-character.

So, [^>] is any character that isn't >