CODEWITHSUNDEEP
phppreg-match
mao
mao

Reputation: 1077

is nested preg_match possible?

I'm trying to learn how to get data out of a page with php, I can see how to get everything between tags, but is there a way to get the content of tags within tags?

In the html below,how would I get access to the content of one of the bold spans, the second one for example?

<html>
<div class="padding10">
<span class="bold"></span>
<span class="bold"></span>
<span class="bold"></span>
<span class="bold"></span>
</div>
</html>

I tried the following, which allows me to get the content of the padding10 div but I don't know how to go any further to get the bold spans. Everything I've tried doesn't work.

//gets all
$file_string = file_get_contents('http://www.test.com/index.html');

//gets all in padding10 div
preg_match('/<div class="padding10">(.*)<\/div>/si', $file_string, $padding_10);

//gets all bold spans on padding10 div??
preg_match_all('/<span class="bold">(.*)<\/span>/i', $padding_10[1], $spans_10);

I'm starting to realise from what I'm reading that this is probably a wrong or inefficient way to be going about this but any help would be great. Thanks.

Upvotes: 1

Views: 696

Answers (2)

dee
dee

Reputation: 194

have you tried this?

Upvotes: 4

Roadmaster
Roadmaster

Reputation: 5357

Maybe phpQuery could help?

"a server-side, chainable, CSS3 selector driven Document Object Model (DOM) API based on jQuery JavaScript Library." This will allow you to select stuff from a parsed HTML document. This may be better-suited to HTML parsing/traversing than doing regexes "by hand".

http://code.google.com/p/phpquery/

Upvotes: 2

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