Extract string from string

Question

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Best way to parse HTML with PHP

I'm new to PHP and want to extract the second date from a string of this format :

<span class="date-display-start">28.12.2011</span><span class="date-display-separator"> - </span><span class="date-display-end">05.01.2012</span>

I'm not sure what PHP functions I can best use to do this ?

http://php.net/manual/en/class.domxpath.php – Eric Herlitz Dec 11 '11 at 18:58 — Eric Herlitz, Dec 11 '11 at 18:58

score 2 · Answer 1 · answered Dec 11 '11 at 18:59

I'd use a simple regular expression. Using the DOMXPath class or similar seems overkill, assuming you don't need more advanced data extraction than this.

preg_match('/<span class="date-display-end">(.*)<\/span>/U', $str, $result);
print array_pop($result);

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Dec 11 '11 at 19:07

You can get this in many different ways, the one of which is "/\d{2}\.\d{2}\.\d{4}/" regular expression:

<?php

$subject = '<span class="date-display-start">28.12.2011</span><span class="date-display-separator"> - </span><span class="date-display-end">05.01.2012</span>';

$regexp = '/\d{2}\.\d{2}\.\d{4}/';

preg_match_all($regexp, $subject, $matches);

print $matches[0][1];

The code above will print "05.01.2012", as in this demo.

Extract string from string

2 Answers2