fail to use regular expression in php

Question

I am trying to execute this function:

   public function get_referring_domains(){
        $pattern='/<p>Referring<b>Class C subnets<\/b>: <b>(.*?)<\/b> <\/p>/';
        $result=  preg_match_all($pattern, $this->dom, $matches, PREG_SET_ORDER);
        return $result;
   }

The result that I want to get is a number , as you can see in the pattern that I set, I want to get: ([0-9]+)... But I get 0 every time..why the pattern doesnt match?

This is what I am trying to match:

$pattern='/<p>Referring[\s]{1}<b>Class[\s]{1}C\ssubnets</b>:[\s]{1}<b>(.*?)</b>[\s]{1}</p>/i';

I get this:

preg_match_all() [function.preg-match-all]: Unknown modifier 'b'

  <p>Referring <b>Class C subnets</b>: <b>4,613</b> </p>

It is part of an html page

UPDATE. changed to this:

Can you add some clear sample text (not embedded n code) of what you want to be matches? — buckley, Jun 07 '12 at 13:42
An html page ... I want it to search through the page and find the pattern — Dmitry Makovetskiyd, Jun 07 '12 at 13:42

score 2 · Accepted Answer · edited May 23 '17 at 12:03

2

You're missing some whitespace, it should be this:

$pattern = '/<p>Referring <b>Class C subnets<\/b>: <b>(.*?)<\/b> <\/p>/';

Also, I'd really suggest using DOMDocument instead of regex.

Read this: How to parse and process HTML with PHP?

edited May 23 '17 at 12:03

Community

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answered Jun 07 '12 at 13:45

Jeroen

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why to use DomDocument instead of regex? – Dmitry Makovetskiyd Jun 07 '12 at 13:47
Great question! [You can't parse HTML with regex by bobince](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1732348/regex-match-open-tags-except-xhtml-self-contained-tags/1732454#1732454) – Jeroen Jun 07 '12 at 13:53

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Jun 07 '12 at 13:46

0

There should be a space after Referring

answered Jun 07 '12 at 13:46

buckley

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fail to use regular expression in php

2 Answers2