Get a text between an html tag and a specific character

Question

In the following string I need to extract only 2014-04-19 using php and regex with preg_match

 ...</abbr></td><td><abbr class="dtend" title="2014-04-19T00:00:00+00:00">19 Apr 2014</abbr></td></tr>...

The preg_match and regex string I use is:

preg_match("/class=\"dtend\" title=\"(.*)\"\>/i", $str,$str2);

The string I obtain is:

2014-04-19T00:00:00+00:00

After "T" numbers (time) are obviously random. I amm not very experienced, neither novice, but really can't fix the issue. Can you provide a suggestion/some help?

Well, going by instinct, you could split by capital T and get the first chunk. What you need to do depends on all possible input scenarios that you want to handle. — Asad Saeeduddin, Apr 11 '14 at 23:36

score 3 · Answer 1 · edited May 23 '17 at 11:57

3

Might use a lookahead to meet T, there are many ways to do it:

$pattern = '/class="dtend" title="\K[^"]+(?=T)/i';

\K resets the beginning of the match, which will be in $out[0] then.
Used [^"]+ as charcters to be matched (+ one or more characters, that are not ")

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edited May 23 '17 at 11:57

Community

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answered Apr 11 '14 at 23:49

Jonny 5

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I like this approach, didn't know about `\K`. – Sam Apr 11 '14 at 23:58

score 0 · Accepted Answer · answered Apr 11 '14 at 23:36

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Your regex is incomplete. Change it to this:

"/class=\"dtend\" title=\"(.*)T.*\"\>/i"

That way, the capture group only captures up to the first T.

answered Apr 11 '14 at 23:36

rvighne

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score 0 · Answer 3 · answered Apr 11 '14 at 23:37

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you can use:

preg_match("/class=\"dtend\" title=\"([0-9\\-]+)[^\"]+\"\>/i", $str,$str2);

([0-9\\-]+) will fetch any numberic symbols or - (NOTE: because of multiple escaping you may need to use tree/four \ here)

[^\"]+ - skip all non " symbols

answered Apr 11 '14 at 23:37

Iłya Bursov

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score 0 · Answer 4 · answered Apr 12 '14 at 00:08

Why using a regelar expression on a known giving string ?

you should do something like this -

$var = '<td>T<abbr class="dtend" title="2014-04-19T00:00:00+00:00">19 Apr 2014</abbr></td></tr>';

$string_to_search = 'class="dtend" title="';

$start = strpos($var, $string_to_search);

$var = substr($var,$start+strlen($string_to_search),10);

It might look worst as regex do it in a simpler way but as long you know what you expecting you should always use simple string functions instead of regex.

Get a text between an html tag and a specific character

4 Answers4