backtracking to match html tag using PHP

Question

I am trying to figure out how to use Regex in PHP to backtrack and find a </div> tag preceding some specific html.

Here is the full HTML I want to look at including the closing tag I want to find and ultimately remove from the string:

</div>
        <div class="dHeading">Grades

It actually has a new line and spaces in between the 2 tags. So I want to target that </div> tag and remove it from the string. Any help would be appreciated.

I am using an online regex tester. Here is what I have right now.

Regex:

/(</div>)([\w\W]*?)(<div)/

It's not that regex is _totally_ incapable of parsing HTML, it's just like trying to perform surgery with a katana... You won't get very far without a huge mess. It's just not expressive enough to eloquently handle the nuances of html. — Kallmanation, Feb 07 '18 at 21:58
If you want to remove the inner close and open of a div tag, this works `(?:(?!)[\S\s])*(
]*?)+)>)` — , Feb 07 '18 at 22:19

score 2 · Accepted Answer · answered Feb 07 '18 at 21:59

2

I suspect if this question is about parsing HTML document at all and regex is totally fine to deal with it:

preg_replace('~</div>\s+(?=<div)~', '', $content);

will do the job. You needed a positive lookahead and considering whitespaces in middle of closing and opening tags, precisely.

answered Feb 07 '18 at 21:59

revo

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This looks promising, but it doesn't seem to be working: http://www.phpliveregex.com/p/mUP – dmikester1 Feb 07 '18 at 22:15
`h` in `dHeading` wasn't capital in your regex. Check this https://3v4l.org/BVkjl – revo Feb 07 '18 at 22:19

backtracking to match html tag using PHP

1 Answers1