PHP regex use same letter

Question

Im trying to do a regex where I can find all html tags, but for each one, each opening and closing tag must be the same. Heres what I mean: (Yes I only want max 3 letters)

preg_match_all("/\<[a-z]{1,3}\>(.*?)\<\/[a-z]{1,3}\>/", $string, $matches);

Where the 2 [a-z]{1,3} are, I want those to be the same, so it doesn't match <b> with <\i>, etc. Thanks... let me know if you need further explanation

Answer 1

Don't parse HTML with regex. Use PHP Tidy instead.

Answer 2

As Vivin Paliath said plus you can try to use PHP5's DomDocument with XPath

http://php.net/manual/en/class.domdocument.php

Answer 3

you really shouldn't be parsing *ml with regex because of problems with nested elements, but if this is any help:

preg_match_all("/<([a-z]{1,3})>(.*?)<\/\1>/", $string, $matches);