PHP Regex negation

Question

I have a web bot which extracts some data from a website. The problem is that the html content is sent without line brakes so it's a little bit harder to match certain things so I need to extract everything that is between td tags. Here's a string example:

<a class="a" href="javascript:ow(19623507)">**-**-**-***.cstel.net</a>&nbsp; (<b><font color="#3300cc">Used</font></b>)</td><td><a class="a" href="javascript:ow(19623507)">**-**-**-***.cstel.net</a>&nbsp; (<b><font color="#3300cc">Used</font></b>)</td>

And my regex so far:

<a\s+class="a"\s+href="javascript:ow\((.*?)\)">.+</a>(?!<td>).+</td>

But my regex matches the whole line instead of matching all contents. Any ideas?

Answer 1

Can you determine where the proper line breaks SHOULD be? If so, it might be easier to first replace those tokens with a proper line break and then use the pattern you have (assuming that pattern works - I haven't tried it).

Your pattern looks VERY specific, but perhaps it works fine for what you are doing.

Answer 2

Have you tried changing .+ to .+? ?

Answer 3

Don't waste your time on regexes. Use DOM and XPath.

 DOMDocument::loadHTML($html)->getElementsByTagName('a')

Answer 4

Ok, I used FrustratedWithFormsDes's advice and managed to go somewhere. Now I need to match any kind of string which has at least a . (dot) and a * (star) character and not a < or > (html tags).

Your help is much appreciated.