REGEX match x times "
anything in here
"

Question

I have a string like this in PHP

<li>bla bla bla bla</li>
<li>hello hello</li>
<li>the brown fox didnt jump</li>
.
.
.
<li>aaaaaaarghhhh</li>

I want to get a string wich contains the first X li's (li tags included in the result string)

<li>.....first one....</li>
<li>.....second one....</li>
<li>.................</li>
<li>.....X one....</li>

How can this be done with REGEX or something else????

I could remove the

</li>

then explode by

<li>

and get the first X elements of array and then adding again li tags at beginning and at end of each element, but i think its too dirty...

Any better ideas?

Famous answer: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1732348/regex-match-open-tags-except-xhtml-self-contained-tags/1732454#1732454 — Kirill Polishchuk, Jul 18 '11 at 10:12
i don't ask for a complete HTML parser, this is a string without any other HTML tags except for

score 4 · Accepted Answer · answered Jul 18 '11 at 10:27

4

See if this regex works for you (replace the number 2 with the required number of li):

((?:<li>.*?<\/li>){2})

answered Jul 18 '11 at 10:27

Aziz Shaikh

16,245
11
62
79

3

A little modified version for to get it work with the example provided: `/^(?:
.*?

Karolis

Jul 18 '11 at 10:37

score 2 · Answer 2 · answered Jul 18 '11 at 10:16

How about parsing it as actual DOM elements using PHP Simple HTML DOM Parser

You can download the script from here: http://sourceforge.net/projects/simplehtmldom/files/

If you load that script in to your current script like this:

include_once("simple_html_dom.php");

Then it's as simple as:

$html = "<li>bla bla bla bla</li>, etc, etc ......";

$list_array = array();

foreach($html->find('li') as $element) {
    $list_array[] = $element->innertext;
}

REGEX match x times "
anything in here
"

2 Answers2

Linked

REGEX match x times " anything in here "

2 Answers2

Linked

REGEX match x times "
anything in here
"