sed equivalent syntax for pcre

Question

basically I am using bash shell script cat new | sed '/1.&nbsp/,/<div/!d' > new2 to extract text starting from 1.&nbsp and ending at first occurrence of <div. And then saving it into a new2 file. How to do the same work in php using pcre.

Answer 1

$text = file_get_contents('php://stdin');
$matches = array();
if(preg_match('/1\.&nbsp(.*?)<div/', $text, $matches)) {
  echo $matches[1];
}

Test:

echo 'abc 1.&nbsp;This is a test<div>more stuff<div>and more' | php test.php
;This is a test