How to get this regular expression to match </span>

Question

This is the sort of HTML string I will be performing matches on:

<span class="q1">+12 Spell Power and +10 Hit Rating</span>

I want to get +12 Spell Power and +10 Hit Rating out of the above HTML. This is the code I wrote:

preg_match('/<span class="q1">(.*)<\/span>/', $gem, $match);

But due to <\/span> it's escaping the / in </span> so it doesn't stop the match, so I get a lot more data than what I want.

How can I escape the / in </span> while still having it part of the pattern?

Thanks.

Answer 1

1. Don't use regex to parse HTML
2. use DOM, particularly the loadHTML method and getElementsByTagName('span')

-

    $doc = new DOMDocument();
    $doc->loadHTML($htmlString);
    $spans = $doc->getElementsByTagName('span');
    if ( $spans->length > 0 ) {
     // loop on $spans
    }

Answer 2

Don't use regex to parse HTML. Use an HTML parser. See Robust, Mature HTML Parser for PHP.

Answer 3

I think the reason that your regex is getting more than you want is because * is greedy, matching as much as possible. Instead, use *?, which will match as little as possible:

preg_match('/<span class="q1">(.*?)<\/span>/', $gem, $match);