php regex for parsing stock symbols in html code

Question

i have following php regex code.. i want to extract the stock symbol in some html output.

The stock symbol i want to extract is /q?s=XXXX -- XXXX (the stock symbol) could be 1 to 5 characters long.

  if(preg_match_all('~(?<=q\?s=)[-A-Z.]{1,5}~', $html, $out))
        {
            $out[0] = array_unique($out[0]);                
        } else {
            echo "FAIL";
        }

HTML code below (case 1 and case that i applied this to)

case #1 (does *not* work)
<a href="/q?s=BLCM" symbol="BLCM">Bellicum Pharmaceuticals, Inc.</a>

case #2 (does work correctly)                          
 <a href="/q?s=NYLD">NYLD</a>

Looking for suggestions on how i can update my php regex code to make it work for both case 1 and case 2. Thanks.

And the lookbehind is somewhat pointless. Just use a plain capture group or a `\K` kill switch. — mario, May 17 '15 at 02:25

score 0 · Accepted Answer · answered May 17 '15 at 03:08

0

Instead of using regex, make effective use of DOM and XPath to do this for you.

$doc = new DOMDocument;
@$doc->loadHTML($html); // load the HTML data

$xpath = new DOMXPath($doc);
$links = $xpath->query('//a[substring(@href, 1, 5) = "/q?s="]');

foreach ($links as $link) {
   $results[] = str_replace('/q?s=', '', $link->getAttribute('href'));
}

print_r($results);

eval.in

answered May 17 '15 at 03:08

hwnd

69,796
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Or if the href value is always fixed, use `$results[] = substr($link->getAttribute('href'), 5);` – hwnd May 17 '15 at 03:12

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered May 17 '15 at 17:19

0

The answer seems nice, but it seems like a lot of work and code to maintain, no?

if (preg_match_all('/q\?s=(\S{1,5})\"/', $html, $match)) {
    $symbols = array_unique($match[1]);
}

or even shorter... '/q\?s=(\S+)\"/'

answered May 17 '15 at 17:19

mike.k

3,277
1
12
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php regex for parsing stock symbols in html code

2 Answers2