How to parse html tag with regular expressions?

Question

I wanted to parse following html tags contents retrieved through curl by regular expressions.

<span class='ui-allscores'>IND - 203/9 (49.4 Ovs)</span>

so that output will be "IND - 203/9 (49.4 Ovs)".

I have written following code but it is not working.

$one="<span class='ui-allscores'>IND - 203/9 (49.4 Ovs)</span>";
$five="~(?<=<span class='ui-allscores'>)[.]*(?=</br></span>)~";
preg_match_all($five,$one,$ui);
print_r($ui);

I wouldn't recommend using RegEx to parse HTML ([see](http://stackoverflow.com/a/1732454/2612112)). — federico-t, Jul 24 '13 at 06:04
^ really unhelpful comment. Of course RegEx can be used to parse the above HTML code. It is very much up to the task. — Thoracius Appotite, Oct 27 '19 at 22:45
@ThoraciusAppotite: as you can see, several persons tagged the comment of federico-t above as useful. — Pierre François, May 09 '20 at 12:54

Bora · Accepted Answer · 2013-07-24T06:14:06.693

7

Try this one:

$string = "<span class='ui-allscores'>IND - 203/9 (49.4 Ovs)</span>";

Dynamic span tag:

preg_match('/<span[^>]*>(.*?)<\/span>/si', $string, $matches);

Specific span tag:

preg_match("/<span class='ui-allscores'>(.*?)<\/span>/si", $string, $matches);

// Output
array (size=2)
  0 => string '<span class='ui-allscores'>IND - 203/9 (49.4 Ovs)</span>' (length=56)
  1 => string 'IND - 203/9 (49.4 Ovs)' (length=22)

edited Jul 24 '13 at 06:14

answered Jul 24 '13 at 06:07

Bora

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Thanks to all for solving my problem. – viki Jul 24 '13 at 06:56
some explainations should be helpful – Reign.85 Jul 09 '15 at 09:51

score 1 · Answer 2 · edited May 23 '17 at 12:33

1

If you simply want to remove the HTML tags, Use the php built-in function strip_tags to remove the html tags.

Another answer on removing html tags Strip all HTML tags, except allowed

edited May 23 '17 at 12:33

Community

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answered Jul 24 '13 at 06:09

Joshua Kissoon

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score 1 · Answer 3 · edited May 23 '17 at 12:33

The problem of your regex is the [.] part. This is matching only a literal ., because the dot is written inside a character class. So just remove the square brackets.

 $five="~(?<=<span class='ui-allscores'>).*(?=</br></span>)~";

The next problem then is the greediness of *. You can change this matching behaviour by putting a ? behind.

$five="~(?<=<span class='ui-allscores'>).*?(?=</br></span>)~";

But the overall point is: You should most probably use a html parser for this job!

How to parse html tag with regular expressions?

3 Answers3

See How do you parse and process HTML/XML in PHP?