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PHP regex to get contents of a specific span element

Answer 1

+6 A:

There are plenty of HTML parsers available for PHP. I suggest you check out one of those, (for example: PHP Simple HTML DOM Parser).

Shooting yourself in the foot with trying to read HTML with regex is a lot easier than you think, and a lot harder to avoid than you wish (especially when you don't know regex thoroughly, and your input is not guaranteed to be 100% clean HTML).

Tomalak 2009-01-23 10:47:06

Thanks for the idea, and you're probably right. I thought that a simple regex would be the quickest and easiest way of achieving this, as I'm not parsing a whole HTML document, just a little string that will always look like the example.

David Heggie 2009-01-23 11:08:49

Then you are probably still better off with two calls to strpos() to get the indexes for the substring you need.

Tomalak 2009-01-23 11:33:11

Just to note; PHP 5.x includes the SimpleXML DOM parser, which makes doing this sort of thing nice and straightforward. You can easily use an XPath query to traverse the DOM and pick out the parts you need.

Rob 2009-01-23 18:43:09

Does it handle (possibly ill-formed) HTML as well?

Tomalak 2009-01-23 21:39:12

Answer 2

A:

(Bad, not working) example which shows why you should not use regex for parsing html.

/<span lang="en">(.*)<\/span>/

Will output:

English Content</span><span lang="fr">French content

More stuff to read:

Parsing: Beyond Regex

For-the-2,295,485th-time-DO-NOT-PARSE-HTML-WITH-REGULAR-EXPRESSIONS

Karsten 2009-01-23 10:47:21

No. That is what I mean by "shooting yourself in the foot".

Tomalak 2009-01-23 10:49:48

I agree using regex for parsing html is not the thing you want to do, but I tried to answer the question.

Karsten 2009-01-23 10:54:30

That's not the point. Your answer is wrong. :-)

Tomalak 2009-01-23 10:55:29

Well, feel free to correct me then :)

Karsten 2009-01-23 10:58:11

Sorry but that's wrong on at least two fronts (and if you can't figure out which two, that's a good reason why you should be using a parser).

cletus 2009-01-23 10:58:31

@cletus: *lol* :-) @Karsten: If you want to find out the error no. 1, simply run your regex against the given example.

Tomalak 2009-01-23 11:00:06

Thanks for idea, Karsten. I modified it slightly, and it works for me:(.*?)

David Heggie 2009-01-23 11:09:21

@David, please read my answer again ;)

Karsten 2009-01-23 11:13:28

Thanks for the links. I'm suitably castigated. :)

David Heggie 2009-01-23 11:17:18

@David Heggie: Yours is better, but it will fail at: "foo bar foo"

Tomalak 2009-01-23 11:34:30

Answer 3

A:

There's this most awesome class that lets you do SQL-like queries on HTML pages. It might be worth a look:

HTML SQL

I've used it a bunch and I love it.

Hope that helps...

2009-01-23 18:40:04

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PHP regex to get contents of a specific span element

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