Regex issue with PHP and preg_match_all

Question

Hi everyone I am having and issue using Regex and can not get it to work when there are spaces or line breaks in the content.

$content = "<dt><span>Name:</span></dt>
                      <dd>
                        John
                      </dd>
                      <dt><span>Age:</span></dt>
                      <dd>
                        40
                      </dd>
                      <dt><span>Sex:</span></dt>
                      <dd>
                        Male
                      </dd>";

The regex i am using is

preg_match_all('/<dt><span>(.*)<\/span><\/dt><dd>(.*)<\/dd>/',$content, $output);

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1732348/regex-match-open-tags-except-xhtml-self-contained-tags#answer-1732454 — webbiedave, Mar 20 '13 at 18:36

score 2 · Accepted Answer · answered Mar 20 '13 at 18:41

Don't parse HTML with RegEx. Use DOM. Here's an example that will work if you are sure about HTML structure.

$dom = new DOMDocument();
@$dom->loadHTML($content);
$xpath = new DOMXPath($dom);
$spans = $xpath->query('//span');
$dds= $xpath->query('//dd');
for ($i = 0; $i < $spans->length; $i++)
{
    echo $spans->item($i)->nodeValue . $dds->item($i)->nodeValue . '<br>';
}

If you are not sure of it's structure, you'll need something a bit more complicated.

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Mar 20 '13 at 18:38

0

Agree that you should use the DOM. however you are not taking account of the whitespace between and

Try:

preg_match_all('/<dt><span>(.*)<\/span><\/dt>.*<dd>(.*)<\/dd>/',$content, $output);

answered Mar 20 '13 at 18:38

Captain Payalytic

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Regex issue with PHP and preg_match_all

2 Answers2