How do I grab this text with preg_match in PHP?

Question

I have the following HTML code

<b>Description: </b>TEXT TO BE GRABBED<br>

I need to use preg_match function to grab the "TEXT TO BE GRABBED".

I have tried the following without success:

<?php preg_match('#<b>Description: </b>(.*)<br>#', $content, $match); ?>

Can someone explain to me the proper method of extracting the text from the HTML?

Thank you.

RegEx is not the best practice to obtain something from HTML. — Subin, Jul 13 '14 at 05:30

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

1

Don't parse HTML with regex. If you have to do so, then your attempt (in the original question before you edited it) was almost right, but you have an extra / in </br> -- there isn't one in your HTML. You should have:

preg_match('#<b>Description: </b>(.*)<br>#', $content, $match);
// $match[1] contains the text "TEXT TO BE GRABBED"

Obligatory link to explain why parsing HTML with regex is bad, very very bad...

edited May 23 '17 at 11:57

Community

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answered Jul 13 '14 at 05:30

elixenide

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I apologize, this was a typo. I've corrected the post. – user1985705 Jul 13 '14 at 05:33
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If that was a typo, then what's the problem? Just refer to `$match[1]`. – elixenide Jul 13 '14 at 05:34

Subin · Answer 2 · 2014-07-13T05:39:09.970

0

The code you have included in the question works well :

<?php
$content = "<b>Description: </b>TEXT TO BE GRABBED<br>";
preg_match('#<b>Description: </b>(.*)<br>#', $content, $match);
print_r($match);

DEMO. And when I echo $match[1], I get the value :

TEXT TO BE GRABBED

edited Jul 13 '14 at 05:39

answered Jul 13 '14 at 05:33

Subin

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How do I grab this text with preg_match in PHP?

2 Answers2