Extract data from this HTML using regex

Question

I'm trying to extract to data between <table class="clubs"> .. </table> using this code:

preg_match('#\<table class\="clubs"\>(.*?)\</table\>#', $raw_data, $new_data);

My HTML markup:

but i get empty array! what's wrong? I believe everything is escaped correctly

I'd guess you need the whatever that option was to match across multiple lines. (Or, better yet, as @AmalMurali says, use a DOM parser) — towr, Feb 23 '14 at 17:38
The is one interesting post I read few hour back about `html` and `regex` http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1732348/regex-match-open-tags-except-xhtml-self-contained-tags — ElectricRouge, Feb 23 '14 at 17:40
@ElectricRouge: Please. That doesn't help the OP. I know it's cool and all, but that's not helpful. Stop linking to that. — Amal Murali, Feb 23 '14 at 17:45

score 3 · Accepted Answer · answered Feb 23 '14 at 17:40

The main problem is that . doesn't match newlines. You can fix it by using the s modifier to make . match newlines as well.

The second problem is that you're using //// while there should be only one /. You also have a lot of unnecessary escapes:

preg_match('#<table class="clubs">(.*?)</table>#s', $raw_data, $new_data);

That said, you would be better off with a parser dedicated to parse HTML.

1 Answers1