Parse a select tag with regex (php)

Question

I would like to scan a specific select tag for all the option-tags values and content in PHP. So that from this

<select>
<option value="donald">duck</option>
<option value="david">moose</option>
</select>
<select id="something"> <!--ignore this one -->
<option value="sdfas">fs</option> <!-- ignore this one -->
...

I would get something like this:

$result['value'][0] == "donald"
$result['content'][1] == "moose"

And for that I tried:

<select>(?:[\s]*<option value="(?P<value>[^"]*)">
(?P<content>[^<]*)</option>)*[\s]*</select>

But I only get a single row (the last one) with the following code:

preg_match_all('%<select>(?:[\s]*<option value="(?P<value>[^"]*)">
(?P<content>[^<]*)</option>)*[\s]*</select>%', 
$contents, $result, PREG_SET_ORDER);

How should I proceed?

Answer 1

The pattern

<option value="(.*?)">(.*?)</option>

Should grab out all the data you need. Then you just need to iterate over the matches to build the array you desire.

Answer 2

You should better use a real parser:

$doc = new DOMDocument();
$doc->loadHTML($str);

$xpath = new DOMXPath($doc);
$result = array('value'=>array(), 'content'=>array());
foreach ($xpath->query('//body/select[count(@*)=0]/option') as $node) {
    $result['value'][] = $node->getAttribute('value');
    $result['content'][] = $node->textContent;
}
var_dump($result);