How to use Perl-compatible regular expression to remove XML tag off XML text in PHP?

Question

I have this XML content:

$XML = "<item xmlns='http://...'>Some value</item>";

I want to extract the value off the tag, so I use the following regular expression:

$Value = preg_replace("/^<item [.]+>/","",$XML);
$Value = preg_replace("/</item>$/","",$Value);

But these don't work, the $Value finally is still the same as $XML. How to fix this?

Using regular expression to parse XML can lead to unespected results. For exemple, if a string with a "&" character is a possible value for the item element, the "&" is escaped as & in well formed XML and the regular expression won't get rid of this entity. — Vincent Biragnet
– Vincent Biragnet, Commented Nov 21, 2011 at 22:57

Aurelio De Rosa · Accepted Answer · 2011-11-21 22:47:22Z

2

If you want to extract the text inside the tag you can use this code:

$string = "<item xmlns='http://...'>Some value</item>";
$regex = '#<.*?>(.*?)</.*?>#';
preg_match_all($regex, $string, $matches);
$matches = $matches[1][0];
echo $matches;

If you want to use preg_replace, use this code:

$Value = preg_replace("/^<item .+?>/","",$XML);
$Value = preg_replace("/<\/item>$/","",$Value);

edited Nov 21, 2011 at 22:47

answered Nov 21, 2011 at 22:31

Aurelio De Rosa

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3 Comments

jondinham Over a year ago

im i mistaken between posix regex & perl-compatible regex?

Aurelio De Rosa Over a year ago

@PaulDinh This regex: <.*?>(.*?)</.*?> is compatible with every language(if you need, you have to escape the '/' with '\/').

jondinham Over a year ago

pls how to do the same thing with preg_replace instead of preg_match_all. the xml has only 1 tag.

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