Regular Expressions to get rows of a table

Question

I have a table that I am trying to parse

<tr>...</tr>
<tr>...</tr>
<tr>...</tr>
<tr>...</tr>

each row is similarly formatted and I want to split them apart using regular expressions. I have tried everything I can think of but it always seems to take the whole contents as the match

I've tried stuff like this

$pattern = ':(<tr>.*</tr>):';
 preg_match_all( $pattern , $working, &$regs2  );

but it always maximally takes everything in one go rather than minimally taking it row by row.

This is probably pretty basic but I just can't seen to get it.

Long story short: Don't use regex to parse HTML. Use a real XML parser. — Rafe Kettler, Mar 10 '11 at 14:32
That was the first thing I tried, but it didn't parse the HTML and I got nothing out of the parser which is why I resorted to regex — paullb, Mar 10 '11 at 14:33
If you have to use regexp to parse HTML, then learn about "greedy" and "ungreedy"... and you're right, it's pretty basic — Mark Baker, Mar 10 '11 at 14:34
Don't. Do. It. Here's why: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/701166/can-you-provide-some-examples-of-why-it-is-hard-to-parse-xml-and-html-with-a-rege — fabrik, Mar 10 '11 at 14:38

score 3 · Answer 1 · answered Mar 10 '11 at 14:34

3

You need to make the .* pattern non-greedy by adding a ?. Try .*? as the middle pattern and see if the problem persists.

Really, you shouldn't use regex to parse HTML, but you did ask what was wrong, so...

answered Mar 10 '11 at 14:34

Rafe Kettler

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Absolutely prefect. (and I really agree that I shouldn't use regex to parse HTML but other possibilities seem to fail). – paullb Mar 10 '11 at 14:40

score 2 · Accepted Answer · answered Mar 10 '11 at 14:34

In the regex tester I usually use, it seems to work normally. (http://regexpal.com/) If it seems like it's too greedy, try using a ? after the * to calm it down a bit. If you're not wanting the capture the <tr></tr> move the () to the inside, like <tr>(.*?)</tr>/

score 1 · Answer 3 · answered Mar 10 '11 at 14:32

1

http://simplehtmldom.sourceforge.net/ Use Simple HTML DOm, it will make parsing the table quite easy

answered Mar 10 '11 at 14:32

dm03514

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Thanks for the idea, I'm going to look into it! – paullb Mar 10 '11 at 14:40

Regular Expressions to get rows of a table

3 Answers3