PHP Regex negation

Question

I have a web bot which extracts some data from a website. The problem is that the html content is sent without line brakes so it's a little bit harder to match certain things so I need to extract everything that is between td tags. Here's a string example:

<a class="a" href="javascript:ow(19623507)">**-**-**-***.cstel.net</a>&nbsp; (<b><font color="#3300cc">Used</font></b>)</td><td><a class="a" href="javascript:ow(19623507)">**-**-**-***.cstel.net</a>&nbsp; (<b><font color="#3300cc">Used</font></b>)</td>

And my regex so far:

<a\s+class="a"\s+href="javascript:ow\((.*?)\)">.+</a>(?!<td>).+</td>

But my regex matches the whole line instead of matching all contents. Any ideas?

possible duplicate of How to parse and process HTML with PHP? — outis
– outis, Commented Mar 29, 2012 at 1:04

Kornel · Accepted Answer · 2009-11-23 22:14:06Z

2

Don't waste your time on regexes. Use DOM and XPath.

 DOMDocument::loadHTML($html)->getElementsByTagName('a')

answered Nov 23, 2009 at 22:14

Kornel

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dwo · Accepted Answer · 2009-11-23 22:08:23Z

1

Have you tried changing .+ to .+? ?

answered Nov 23, 2009 at 22:08

dwo

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FrustratedWithFormsDesigner · Accepted Answer · 2009-11-23 22:08:12Z

0

Can you determine where the proper line breaks SHOULD be? If so, it might be easier to first replace those tokens with a proper line break and then use the pattern you have (assuming that pattern works - I haven't tried it).

Your pattern looks VERY specific, but perhaps it works fine for what you are doing.

answered Nov 23, 2009 at 22:08

FrustratedWithFormsDesigner

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