Regexp matching attributes for html element

Question

I'm working on a regular expression pattern to extract tag and attributes from an html element. But I have some problems with matching the attributes :s. Only the last attribute is stored into the matches array.

Here is the code:

<?php
    $subject = '<font face="arial" size="1" color="red">hello world!</font>';
    $find= '/<(?P<tag>\w+)\s+((?P<attr>\w+)=(?P<value>[^\s""\'>]+|"[^"]*"|\'[^\']*\')\s*)*\/?>/si';

    preg_match_all( $find, $subject, $matches );
?>

Can someone help me out?

Many thanks

You can't reliably parse HTML with regular expressions. See the awesome rant on this subject here: stackoverflow.com/questions/1732348/… — sbleon
– sbleon, Commented Jul 12, 2010 at 15:57
But what if I want to parse html to xhtml? I read that xpath is xhtml compatible. — Maarten
– Maarten, Commented Jul 12, 2010 at 16:11

Community · Accepted Answer · 2017-05-23 12:01:12Z

1

Some important points:

You shouldn't use regex to parse HTML. PHP has many excellent HTML parsing libraries.
A group that captures repeatedly in a match only keeps the last capture.
- One notable exception is .NET regex

References

regular-expressions.info/Brackets for Capturing

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edited May 23, 2017 at 12:01

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answered Jul 12, 2010 at 15:56

polygenelubricants

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1 Comment

polygenelubricants Over a year ago

This is the better read: regular-expressions.info/captureall.html - Capturing a repeated group vs repeating a capturing group.

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