is nested preg_match possible?

Question

I'm trying to learn how to get data out of a page with php, I can see how to get everything between tags, but is there a way to get the content of tags within tags?

In the html below,how would I get access to the content of one of the bold spans, the second one for example?

<html>
<div class="padding10">
<span class="bold"></span>
<span class="bold"></span>
<span class="bold"></span>
<span class="bold"></span>
</div>
</html>

I tried the following, which allows me to get the content of the padding10 div but I don't know how to go any further to get the bold spans. Everything I've tried doesn't work.

//gets all
$file_string = file_get_contents('http://www.test.com/index.html');

//gets all in padding10 div
preg_match('/<div class="padding10">(.*)<\/div>/si', $file_string, $padding_10);

//gets all bold spans on padding10 div??
preg_match_all('/<span class="bold">(.*)<\/span>/i', $padding_10[1], $spans_10);

I'm starting to realise from what I'm reading that this is probably a wrong or inefficient way to be going about this but any help would be great. Thanks.

This should get you started : stackoverflow.com/questions/1898905/… — yoda
– yoda, Commented Feb 23, 2012 at 3:19

dee · Accepted Answer · 2012-02-23 03:19:44Z

4

have you tried this?

answered Feb 23, 2012 at 3:19

dee

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1 Comment

mao Over a year ago

This is a lot simpler. It's working for me, code in case anyone finds it useful: foreach($html->find('div[class=padding10]') as $element); foreach($element->find('span[class=bold]') as $e) echo $e->innertext . '<br>';

Roadmaster · Accepted Answer · 2012-02-23 03:18:55Z

2

Maybe phpQuery could help?

"a server-side, chainable, CSS3 selector driven Document Object Model (DOM) API based on jQuery JavaScript Library." This will allow you to select stuff from a parsed HTML document. This may be better-suited to HTML parsing/traversing than doing regexes "by hand".

http://code.google.com/p/phpquery/

answered Feb 23, 2012 at 3:18

Roadmaster

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1 Comment

mao Over a year ago

sorry never really used php before, is it as simple as downloading and adding : require_once('phpQuery-onefile.php');

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