How to find content using PHP regular expression

Question

I want to find content inside of a DIV. I just want to specify the DIV’s id; the rest is automatically adjusted under preg_match. E.g.:

<div id="midbuttonarea" etc...>some text...</div>

Is there something which prevents you from using phps DOM-classes? It would make things a lot easier. — Yoshi, Apr 29 '11 at 07:17

score 1 · Answer 1 · edited May 23 '17 at 12:13

1

You're much more likely to get a good result using an HTML parser to parse HTML instead of Regex. It's extremely difficult to parse HTML with Regex, and the result may not be very reliable.

Check the accepted answer to this question: How do you parse and process HTML/XML in PHP? for some suggestions on how to go about it.

edited May 23 '17 at 12:13

Community

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answered Apr 29 '11 at 07:18

Brenton Alker

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it can be possible in php regular expression. – rajan Apr 29 '11 at 07:27

score 1 · Answer 2 · edited Apr 29 '11 at 08:38

1

Brenton is right. Anyway, here you have:

<?php
   function findDivInnerHtml($html, $id){
      preg_match("/<div .* id=\"{$id}\" .*>(.*)<\\/div>/i", $html, $matches);
      return $matches[1];
   }
?>

Sample usage:

<?php
   $html = '<div id="other"> xxx </div>  <div id="midbuttonarea" etc...>some text...</div> ';
   $innerHTML = findDivInnerHtml($html, 'midbuttonarea');       
   echo $innerHTML; //outputs "some text..."
?>

Hope this helps.

edited Apr 29 '11 at 08:38

Adam Lynch

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answered Apr 29 '11 at 07:32

Edgar Villegas Alvarado

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Forgot to tell you that `$html` doesn't have to have line breaks. You can easily remove them with `str_replace` first – Edgar Villegas Alvarado Apr 29 '11 at 07:33

How to find content using PHP regular expression

2 Answers2