Get everything inside regexp

Question

I have the following code. I am trying to get everything inside the "a" tags. At the moment it is working. I am getting “first” and “second” as an output. opening "a" tag and closing "a" tag are in the same line.

$v = 'this is test 
<a href="products.html">first</a> 
<a>second</a;
preg_match_all("#<a\b[^>]*>(.*?)</a>#", $v, $foo);
echo implode("\n", $foo[1]);

But if I write the following way,

$v = '<a href="products.html">first
</a> 
preg_match_all("#<a\b[^>]*>(.*?)</a>#", $v, $foo);
echo implode("\n", $foo[1])';

here i moved the closing "a" tag to the second line and now It's not giving me any output. Does anyone know how to make it work?

[Don't use regexes for parsing HTML](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1732348/regex-match-open-tags-except-xhtml-self-contained-tags/1732454#1732454) — John Conde, Feb 20 '13 at 14:03
try to use simple_html_dom http://simplehtmldom.sourceforge.net/ Working with regex to parse html is not well solution. — sanj, Feb 20 '13 at 14:10
@JezenThomas: Someday we shall be redeemed and the evil will be cast out. — prodigitalson, Feb 20 '13 at 14:10
http://www.php.net/manual/en/reference.pcre.pattern.modifiers.php look at PCRE_MULTILINE — Mahakala, Feb 20 '13 at 14:11
@Mahakala, PCRE_MULTILINE is not relevant. It is PCRE_DOTALL. — , Feb 20 '13 at 14:23
Can SO write a regex to filter out questions about parsing HTML with regex, and automatically forward them to that question in the first comment? — Billy Moon, Feb 20 '13 at 14:53

score 1 · Accepted Answer · edited May 23 '17 at 12:18

1

As for the problem you are having, it is because you need to enable the single line option (s):

preg_match_all("#<a\b[^>]*>(.*?)</a>#s", $v, $foo);

Otherwise . does not match a line break.

Explanation of the option from the documentation:

If this modifier is set, a dot metacharacter in the pattern matches all characters, including newlines. Without it, newlines are excluded.

But you probably would be better off not using a regex. See this question for other approaches in PHP.

edited May 23 '17 at 12:18

Community

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answered Feb 20 '13 at 14:17

+1 for actually providing a solution. That old “Don’t use regex for parsing HTML!” link is getting very tired. – Jezen Thomas Feb 20 '13 at 14:37
Can you please tell me what that "s" is for?. Thanks. I used it and it works perfect. – Santi . Feb 20 '13 at 14:38

Get everything inside regexp

1 Answers1