Is there a better way to write this regex?

Question

I'm trying to pull the weather from the weather network. This code gives it to me, but it looks pretty long, and returns two values in the array (that's why I need to return $output[1] and not $output[0]), when I only want it to return one. Any ideas?

$url=file_get_contents("http://www.theweathernetwork.com/weather/cans0057?ref=homecity");

preg_match('/<div id="obs_conds" class="hslice">.*?<img.*?alt="(.*?)".*?<\/div>/s',$url,$output);

print_r($output[1]);

*(related)* [Best Methods to parse HTML](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3577641/best-methods-to-parse-html/3577662#3577662) — Gordon, Jul 16 '11 at 19:44
The Weather Channel also provides the weather data as RSS Feed which is much easier to parse: `echo simplexml_load_file('http://rss.theweathernetwork.com/weather/cans0057')->channel->item[0]->description;` — Gordon, Jul 16 '11 at 19:57

score 3 · Accepted Answer · answered Jul 16 '11 at 19:25

3

I think it's great. Maybe you can make shortcut from it

preg_match('/class="hslice">.*?<img.*?alt="(.*?)"/s',$url,$output);

answered Jul 16 '11 at 19:25

genesis

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Thanks! Works just as well. :) Do you know why I'm getting two values in my array and not one? – bozdoz Jul 16 '11 at 19:27
because [0] has ALWAYS whole "search for" matched value – genesis Jul 16 '11 at 19:29

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Jul 16 '11 at 19:43

I believe preg_matches returns the whole match in the the first element of the array $output[1] and $output[1] the text that matched the first captured parenthesized subpattern, and so on (http://php.net/manual/en/function.preg-match.php). Regarding the regex optimization, I guess you're trying to pull everything inside <div id="obs_conds" class="hslice">, if that is the case I would try to do a dom search instead.

On the other hand maybe the best solution is to contact the site and set a webservice client. It seems to me that they do have the infrastucture for that.

Is there a better way to write this regex?

2 Answers2