Preg match text in php between html tags

Question

Hello I would like to use preg_match in PHP to parse the "Desired text" out of the following from a html document

<p class="review"> Desired text </p>

Ordinarily I would use simple_html_dom for such things but on this occasion it cannot be used (the above element doesn't appear in every desired div tag so I'm forced to use this approach to keep track of exactly when it doesn't appear and then adjust my array from simple_html_dom accordingly).

Anyway, this would solve my problem.

Thanks so much.

serg · Accepted Answer · 2009-10-19 03:04:54Z

75

preg_match("'<p class=\"review\">(.*?)</p>'si", $source, $match);
if($match) echo "result=".$match[1];

answered Oct 19, 2009 at 3:04

serg

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2 Comments

Ross Snyder Over a year ago

Isn't this likely to overmatch? See my answer below.

serg Over a year ago

It won't overmatch because of lazy quantification. .*? will grab as less as possible, while .* would grab as much as possible.

Andy N · Accepted Answer · 2010-06-18 05:21:00Z

11

if you want to return multiple matches then need to use preg_match_all(). You then loop through the second result group ($match[1]) to get just the content between tags.

$source = "<p class=\"review\"> Desired text1 </p>".
"<p class=\"review\"> Desired text2 </p>".
"<p class=\"review\"> Desired text3 </p>";


    preg_match_all("'<p class=\"review\">(.*?)</p>'si", $source, $match);

    foreach($match[1] as $val)
    {
        echo $val."<br>";


    }

Outputs:

Desired text1
Desired text2
Desired text3

answered Jun 18, 2010 at 5:21

Andy N

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Comments

Ross Snyder · Accepted Answer · 2010-03-03 05:20:00Z

8

What if the string you're matching has multiple lines and is:

<p class="review"> Desired text1 </p>
<p class="review"> Desired text2 </p>
<p class="review"> Desired text3 </p>

That pattern would match once, and the match would be everything in the string.

I think a better pattern is:

"'<p class=\"review\">([^<]*)</p>'si"

answered Mar 3, 2010 at 5:20

Ross Snyder

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1 Comment

Adrian Tanase Over a year ago

yes, thanks, i've been trying stuff for the past 2 hours and I finally realised that the stocks are being displayed with JavaScript, after the page is loading :((( so yey, that's why the script was not working thanks all

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