How to Ignore Whitespaces using preg_match()

Question

I have a string that looks like:

">ANY CONTENT</span>(<a id="show

I need to fetch ANY CONTENT. However, there are spaces in between

</span> and (<a id="show

Here is my preg_match:

$success = preg_match('#">(.*?)</span>\s*\(<a id="show#s', $basicPage, $content);

\s* represents spaces. I get an empty array!

Any idea how to fetch CONTENT?

@anubhava Right, but it fetches rest of page. I just need to fetch what's between and ( — user311509, Feb 24 '12 at 23:01
Do you need to fetch `ANY CONTENT`, `CONTENT` or what comes after ? Your question and comment are very confusing. — jgivoni, Feb 24 '12 at 23:09
Solved... I had to put . before "> to specify from where to start... — user311509, Feb 24 '12 at 23:29

score 0 · Accepted Answer · edited May 23 '17 at 12:20

Use a real HTML parser. Regular expressions are not really suitable for the job. See this answer for more detail.

You can use DOMDocument::loadHTML() to parse into a structured DOM object that you can then query, like this very basic example (you need to do error checking though):

$dom = new DOMDocument;
$dom->loadHTML($data);
$span = $dom->getElementsByTagName('span');
$content = $span->item(0)->textContent;

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Feb 24 '12 at 23:05

I just had to:

">

define the above properly, because "> were too many in the page, so it didn't know which one to choose specficially. Therefore, it returned everything before "> until it hits (

Solution:

.">

Sample:

$success = preg_match('#\.">(.*?)</span>\s*\(<a id="show#s', $basicPage, $content);

How to Ignore Whitespaces using preg_match()

2 Answers2