Is there any way to use a preg expression to search string and put in array? PHP

Question

Ive been trying to use preg_split but it's not working very well, this is how I'm using it:

$html_str = '<span class="spanClass" rel="rel span">Text Span</span>';

$arrTemp = preg_split('/\<span class=\"spanClass\" rel=\"(.+?)\"\>(.+?)\<\/span\>/', $html_str);

So I would get this 2 '(.+?)' variables into an array(span rel and Text Span).

I'm probably not thinking about it in the best possible way to solve my problem, but the fact is that my string will have more than one <span> mixed with trash html and I need to separate only the <span> content in an array. Any better ideas?

@Diogo: why not using all those wonderful features like DomDocument or simplexml, would be simpler no? — RageZ
– RageZ, Commented Oct 25, 2011 at 12:01
@RageZ Simplexml would only work for valid XHTML. Only DOM can parse broken HTML. — Gordon
– Gordon, Commented Oct 25, 2011 at 12:03
@Gordon: good remark but nothing that tidy wouldn't help ;-) — RageZ
– RageZ, Commented Oct 25, 2011 at 12:06
@Phil the linked answer does not explain why you do not want to use Regex for parsing HTML at all. It's just a rant that got too many upvotes due to funny characters. Worst of all, it's wrong: PHP's Regex engine uses PCRE and that can parse HTML. I'm all for using a DOM parser, but in all fairness, whether to use Regex or a Parser depends on the complexity of the markup you want to parse. — Gordon
– Gordon, Commented Oct 25, 2011 at 12:31
possible duplicate of extract tag attribute from xml and grabbing th href attribute of an a element — Gordon
– Gordon, Commented Oct 25, 2011 at 12:35

Ahmed Masud · Accepted Answer · 2011-10-25 12:25:36Z

0

First of all preg_split is the wrong function, you really meant preg_match from the syntax of regex that you seem to be using.

Correct use would be:

$html = '<span class="spanClass" rel="foo bar">Text Span</span>';
preg_match("/<span.*rel=[\"']([^\"']+)[\"'][^>]*>([^<]+)<\/span>/", $html, &$A);
print_r($A);

This outputs:

Array
(
    [0] => <span class="spanClass" rel="foo bar">Text Span</span>
    [1] => foo bar
    [2] => Text Span
)

So above uses preg_match; $A[0] contains the entire line $A[1] the rel= stuff and $A[2] the Text Span stuff.

edited Oct 25, 2011 at 12:25

answered Oct 25, 2011 at 12:20

Ahmed Masud

22.7k3 gold badges37 silver badges60 bronze badges

Sign up to request clarification or add additional context in comments.

Collectives™ on Stack Overflow

Is there any way to use a preg expression to search string and put in array? PHP

1 Answer 1

Comments

Your Answer

Linked

Hot Network Questions

Collectives™ on Stack Overflow

1 Answer 1

Comments

Your Answer

Sign up or log in

Post as a guest

Linked

Related