CODEWITHSUNDEEP
phpregexnestedpreg-match
Benoît Pointet
Benoît Pointet

Reputation: 898

preg_match for nested html tags

I would like to catch all "dev" tags and their respective content, through php preg_match_all() but can't get the nested ones.

data:

<dev>aaa</dev> <dev>bbb</dev> <dev> ccc <dev>ddd</dev> </dev>

my expression so far:

|<dev>(.*)</dev>|Uis

thanks, for your help, b.

Upvotes: 0

Views: 4495

Answers (3)

Will Earp
Will Earp

Reputation: 312

You need to have a recursive matching pattern:

/<dev>(.*|(?R))<\/dev>/i

That will just suck up any nested elements, so if you want to then parse those, you will have to run the function again on $matches[1]

Upvotes: 1

Gumbo
Gumbo

Reputation: 655189

Don’t use regular expressions for parsing. Use a real parser like DOMDocument or SimpleXML:

$xml = simplexml_load_string('<root>'.$str.'</root>');

Upvotes: 7

bandi
bandi

Reputation: 4244

The * is a greedy operator, consumes as many characters as possible. You should use the *? non-greedy version instead to find the smallest possible matches. Maybe regexes are not the best tools to do this.

Upvotes: -1

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