What this symbol .*? means in PHP (HTML Parsing)

[DanielB]

i just wanna ask what this symbol .*? means in php.here is the sample code:\[code\] function parse($html) { //echo "Find table(id=weekdays)..\n"; $pattern = "/(<table.*?id=\"weekdays\".*)/ims"; //$pattern = "/(<div.*?id=\"flexBox_flex_calendar_mainCal\".*)/ims"; //echo $pattern."\n"; $match = array(); //$html = str_replace("\r", "", $html); //$html = str_replace("\n", "", $html); if (preg_match($pattern, $html, $match) > 0) { //print_r($match); //echo $match[1]; //echo count($match); $this->parseTable($match[1]); } else { echo "Error: no match calendar data(table id=weekdays) found, maybe fx.com change its site html'!\n"; }}\[/code\]I am maintaining a website that has the function to extract the table values from another/an external website then parse it to insert on our database..I have to change the value of $pattern but i cant since i didn't know what does that symbols mean..Thank you so much for the help..