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... server side and using PHP.

I read this SO article on when to use regexes and it basically states that you can use regexes to parse HTML in certain cases.

<title></title>

should be easy to match.

I see no problem with this. I think the popular answer is voted so much for not b.c. of correctness but b.c. of entrainment value.

Is this O.K?

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cade galt
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2 Answers2

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Yes, it is

/<title[^>]*>(.*?)<\/title>/is

Different people have different opinions, though. And you should only use regex if you know what you're doing.
This might me a very interesting read: When you should NOT use Regular Expressions?

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Luis Ávila
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Your best bet is to use an HTML parsing library (like this one), not regex. You may get away with using regex in this case, but it's like using a hammer to pound in a screw.

If you are looking for anything non-trivial in the HTML, regex is going to be very confusing and hard to read, and in many cases, regex cannot do the job without making many assumptions about the content of the HTML.

woz
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  • Can you give me a single example of where the regex posted by Luis will fail ? – cade galt Oct 27 '15 at 16:27
  • Whether or not it will fail is not the point. Will you give me a single example of a screw I could not pound in with a hammer? – woz Oct 27 '15 at 16:28