Using regex to strip out certain data from HTML code via PHP

Question

I have the following HTML snippet

<tr>
<td class="1">...</td>
<td class="2">...</td>
<td class="3">...</td>
<td class="4">...</td>
</tr>
etc...

I basically have N rows, and each row contains 4 TD's each with a unique class. I would like a simple way to split out all the rows and TD's by class so I can choose what data I want to use.

I expect the easiest way to achieve this would be regex (maybe two). One to split up the TR's then another to split up the TDs (by class preferably)

Thanks

Answer 1

Obligatory: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1732348/regex-match-open-tags-except-xhtml-self-contained-tags/1732454#1732454

Use a DOMParser or SimpleHTMLDom for html

Answer 2

Regex isn't typically a good way to parse HTML, I would recommend using SimpleXML http://www.php.net/manual/en/book.simplexml.php and running XPath queries on the data.