CODEWITHSUNDEEP
phpregex
user813813
user813813

Reputation: 355

Using preg_match_all to get items from HTML

I have a number of items in a table, formatted like this

<td class="product highlighted">
Item Name
</td>

and I am using the following PHP code

$regex_pattern = "/<td class=\"product highlighted\">(.*)<\/td>/";
preg_match_all($regex_pattern,$buffer,$matches);
print_r($matches);

I am not getting any output, yet I can see the items in the html.

Is there something wrong with my regexp?

Upvotes: 0

Views: 648

Answers (2)

Jason McCreary
Jason McCreary

Reputation: 72981

In order to match your example, you will need to add the dot all flag, s, so the . will match newlines.

Try the following.

$regex_pattern = "/<td class=\"product highlighted\">(.*?)<\/td>/s";

Also note that I changed the capture to non-greedy, (.*?). It's best to do so when matching open ended text.

It's worth noting regular expressions are not the right tool for HTML parsing, you should look into DOMDocument. However, for such a simple match you can get away with regular expressions provided your HTML is well-formed.

Upvotes: 3

Tim Pietzcker
Tim Pietzcker

Reputation: 336158

Apart from your using regex to parse HTML, yes, there is something wrong: The dot doesn't match newlines.

So you need to use 

$regex_pattern = "/<td class=\"product highlighted\">(.*?)<\/td>/s";

The /s modifier allows the dot to match any character, including newlines. Note the reluctant quantifier .*? to avoid matching more than one tag at once.

Upvotes: 6

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