Regular expression match using preg match all in php

Question

I have a string like this

<a href="http://www.example1.com"><b>12345</b> - John George<br><span>some_text1</span></a>
<a href="http://www.example2.com"><b>67890</b> - George Jerry<br><span>some_text2</span></a>

Using preg_match_all (PHP) I want to be able to extract the url, id and name but I`m not figured out the good sPattern (see bellow):

$sPattern = "/<a href=\"(.*?)\"><b>(.*?)<\/b>\" - (.*?)\"<br>(.*?)/";
preg_match_all($sPattern, $content, $aMatch);

Kevin · Accepted Answer · 2014-09-19 14:12:06Z

2

I humbly suggest use an HTML Parser like DOMDocument instead:

$html = '<a href="http://www.example1.com"><b>12345</b> - John George<br><span>some_text1</span></a>
<a href="http://www.example2.com"><b>67890</b> - George Jerry<br><span>some_text2</span></a>';

$dom = new DOMDocument();
$dom->loadHTML($html);
$anchors = $dom->getElementsByTagName('a');
$data = array();
foreach($anchors as $anchor) {
    $href = $anchor->nodeValue; // get the anchor href
    $b = $anchor->firstChild->nodeValue; // get the b tag value
    $data[] = array('href' => $href, 'id' => $b);
}

echo '<pre>';
print_r($data);

answered Sep 19, 2014 at 14:12

Kevin

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Santhos · Accepted Answer · 2014-09-22 14:01:42Z

1

Probably better if you write a bit more specific patterns, try this one:

$sPattern = "/<a href=\"([ˆ"]+)\"><b>(\d+)<\/b> - ((\w+ )*\w+)<br><span>([^<]+)<\/span><\/a>/";

edited Sep 22, 2014 at 14:01

answered Sep 19, 2014 at 14:09

Santhos

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2 Comments

Larry Over a year ago

I tried a pattern like this: "/<a href=\"(.*?)\">(.*?)<\/b> - (\w+)/" It works fine but with a little exception: if I have names like 'Tom-Jerry' or 'Tom & Jerry' returns only the first word (e.g. 'Tom')

Santhos Over a year ago

I see, then you have to change the last bracket, probably the best way to change it is to ([^<]+). That would select everything to the element. The only problem would be if there were another element inside the span, something like Tom & Jerry

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