php find all elements with style attribute using preg_match_all

Question

I just want to find ALL elements with preg_match_all in a html document. After reading the file i am using the following:

preg_match_all('<.*style=?.*>',$file,$patterns);
print_r( $patterns[0] ); die;

Gives all the elements but with spacing and other stuff before the < and >. Also the output has an end tag in the result (for example: '). I have play around with preg expressions but drives me insane. Can somebody tell me what is the correct syntax to use?

The output is now:

Array
(
    [0] => <table style="position:absolute;width:100%;height:100%;">
    [1] =>  <div class="_barcode_pdf417" style="margin:0 auto;width:176px;height:132px;background:#FFF;color:#000;"><div style="margin:0 auto;margin:0;padding:0;border:0">
    [2] =>      <div style="position:absolute;width:14px;height:128px;background:#000;"></div>
    [3] =>      <div style="position:absolute;margin-left:18px;width:2px;height:128px;background:#000;"></div>
    [4] =>      <div style="position:absolute;margin-left:22px;width:2px;height:128px;background:#000;"></div>
    [5] =>      <div style="position:absolute;margin-left:26px;width:2px;height:128px;background:#000;"></div>
........
........
........

But i want:

Array
(
    [0] => <table style="position:absolute;width:100%;height:100%;">
    [1] => <div class="_barcode_pdf417" style="margin:0 auto;width:176px;height:132px;background:#FFF;color:#000;">
<div style="margin:0 auto;margin:0;padding:0;border:0">
    [2] => <div style="position:absolute;width:14px;height:128px;background:#000;">
    [3] => <div style="position:absolute;margin-left:18px;width:2px;height:128px;background:#000;">
    [4] => <div style="position:absolute;margin-left:22px;width:2px;height:128px;background:#000;">
    [5] => <div style="position:absolute;margin-left:26px;width:2px;height:128px;background:#000;">
......
......

Thank you for your answer! Kind regards.

Please see [link](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1732348/regex-match-open-tags-except-xhtml-self-contained-tags/1732454#1732454). — Czechnology, Apr 10 '11 at 21:11
The `<` and `>` are being seen as [pattern delimiters](http://php.net/regexp.reference.delimiters), not literal angle brackets to match. — salathe, Apr 10 '11 at 21:18
possible duplicate of [(PHP5) Extracting a title tag and RSS feed address from HTML using PHP DOM or Regex](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3054347/php5-extracting-a-title-tag-and-rss-feed-address-from-html-using-php-dom-or-reg) — Gordon, Apr 10 '11 at 21:31
üpssible duplicate of [php getElementsByTagName with specific attribute](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4224286/php-getelementsbytagname-with-specific-attribute/4224309#4224309) — Gordon, Apr 10 '11 at 21:32
@Czechnology can we please stop linking that answer. it might be funny but it's wrong. Regex can parse HTML. It's just not practical to do so in most cases when there is parsers out there. — Gordon, Apr 10 '11 at 21:34
*(related)* [Best Methods to parse HTML](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3577641/best-methods-to-parse-html/3577662#3577662) — Gordon, Apr 10 '11 at 21:34
Okay,okay,i understand (but didn't read the messy answer behind the link). Maybe it is bad to use reg expressions to parse html but i know that the contents of the file is properly formatted. I just want to have all tags that has a style attribute to convert the inline style to a css style. — Codebeat, Apr 11 '11 at 03:58

score 1 · Answer 1 · answered Aug 08 '11 at 21:23

$html = <<< EOF
[0] => <table style="position:absolute;width:100%;height:100%;">
[1] =>  <div class="_barcode_pdf417" style="margin:0 auto;width:176px;height:132px;background:#FFF;color:#000;"><div style="margin:0 auto;margin:0;padding:0;border:0">
[2] =>      <div style="position:absolute;width:14px;height:128px;background:#000;"></div>
[3] =>      <div style="position:absolute;margin-left:18px;width:2px;height:128px;background:#000;"></div>
[4] =>      <div style="position:absolute;margin-left:22px;width:2px;height:128px;background:#000;"></div>
[5] =>      <div style="position:absolute;margin-left:26px;width:2px;height:128px;background:#000;"></div>
........
........
........"
EOF;


preg_match_all('/([<div|<table]+.*?style.*?>)/i', $html, $result, PREG_PATTERN_ORDER);
for ($i = 0; $i < count($result[0]); $i++) {
echo   $result[1][$i];
}

will output:

<table style="position:absolute;width:100%;height:100%;">
<div class="_barcode_pdf417" style="margin:0 auto;width:176px;height:132px;background:#FFF;color:#000;">
<div style="margin:0 auto;margin:0;padding:0;border:0">
<div style="position:absolute;width:14px;height:128px;background:#000;">
<div style="position:absolute;margin-left:18px;width:2px;height:128px;background:#000;">
<div style="position:absolute;margin-left:22px;width:2px;height:128px;background:#000;">
<div style="position:absolute;margin-left:26px;width:2px;height:128px;background:#000;">

although, the best option is to use an html dom parser

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Apr 10 '11 at 21:18

I would strongly advise against using regex for operating on (X)HTML in this fashion, as PHP provides a higher level API for the job in the form of the DOMDocument extension. You can use it to iterate over a valid DOm structure and find elements with specific attributes. Operation is fairly similar to Javascript DOM manipulation with features such as GetElementById, GetElementByClassName and suchlike available to you.

You could use it to iterate of the body's child elements (and their children recursively) to find the elements with styles defined.

php find all elements with style attribute using preg_match_all

2 Answers2