regexp to find this pattern

Question

PHP => How can i search through this string in such a way that when i have class="font8text">N</span>' to give me 'EARLL' which is in the next <span>.

<div align="left" style=";">    
<span style="width:15px; padding:1px; border:1pt solid #999999; background-color:#CCFFCC; text-align:center;" class="font8text">Y</span>
<span style="text-align:left; white-space:nowrap;" class="font8text">DINNIMAN</span>
</div>

<div align="left" style="background-color:#F8F8FF;">
  <span style="width:15px; padding:1px; border:1pt solid #999999; background-color:#FFCCCC; text-align:center;" class="font8text">N</span>
  <span style="text-align:left; white-space:nowrap;" class="font8text">EARLL</span>
</div>

Use an HTML parser -> Find an element with the right class and contents -> retrieve the contents of the next successive element — Anon., Dec 08 '10 at 21:57
Weird, the question claims to be about PHP, but is tagged jquery instead. It can't be both, can it? — Jason Orendorff, Dec 08 '10 at 22:37
check this http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1732348/regex-match-open-tags-except-xhtml-self-contained-tags — NullPoiиteя, Dec 30 '12 at 06:32

score 1 · Answer 1 · edited May 23 '17 at 11:55

1

Use a DOM-parser like: http://simplehtmldom.sourceforge.net/

As mentioned (a painless amount of times). Regex is not a good way to parse HTML. Actually, you can't really parse HTML with Regex. HTML is not regular in any form. You can only extract bits. And that's still (in most cases) very unreliable data.

It's better to use a DOM-parser. Because a parser that parses the HTML to a document, makes it easier to traverse.

Example:

include_once('simple_html_dom.php');

$dom = file_get_html('<html>...');

foreach($dom->find("div.head div.fact p.fact") as $element)
    die($element->innertext);

edited May 23 '17 at 11:55

Community

1
1

answered Dec 08 '10 at 23:11

Robin Orheden

2,714
23
24

+1 for dom parser ...instead of [dam regx for this](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1732348/regex-match-open-tags-except-xhtml-self-contained-tags) – NullPoiиteя Dec 30 '12 at 06:32

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Dec 08 '10 at 21:58

I think you're better off using strpos and substr succinct with each other.

Example:

$str = <insert your string here>; // populate data
$_find = 'class="font8text">'; // set the search text
$start = strpos($str,$find) + strlen($_find); // find the start off the text and offset by the $needle
$len = strpos($str,'<',$start) - $start; find the end, then subtract the start for length
$text = substr($str,$start,$len); // result

score 0 · Answer 3 · answered Dec 08 '10 at 22:01

0

This would do it:

/class="font8text">N.*?class="font8text">(.*?)</m

EARLL would be in the first match group. Try it on Rubular.

answered Dec 08 '10 at 22:01

detunized

15,059
3
48
64

regexp to find this pattern

3 Answers3