basic php regex question

Question

I have an html file where I'd like to get all the text inside these two tags:

<div class="articleTitle">
</div>

I'm not entirely sure how to do the php regex. (I also know there are no html tags inside the div, so there's no problem about nested tags)

update: when i try the solutions given i get this: Warning: preg_match() [function.preg-match]: Unknown modifier 'd' on line 29

Answer 1

This would be more correct, as other solutions would match <div class="articleTitle"><div/> by itself, which is probably undesirable?

preg_match('<div class="articleTitle">(.+?)</div>', $test_string, $matches);

Answer 2

preg_match('/<div class="articleTitle">(.*?)<\/div>/i', $source, $matches);
print_r($matches);

This is the "Explination" from RegexBuddy:

<div class="articleTitle">(.*?)</div>

Options: case insensitive

Match the characters “<div class="articleTitle">” literally «<div class="articleTitle">»
Match the regular expression below and capture its match into backreference number 1 «(.*?)»
   Match any single character that is not a line break character «.*?»
      Between zero and unlimited times, as few times as possible, expanding as needed (lazy) «*?»
Match the characters “</div>” literally «</div>»

Created with RegexBuddy

(.*?) will capture everything between what comes before it until what comes after it, and it will be places into the $matches var.

I assumed that the HTML will be in the $source var.

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Answer 3

'/<div class="articleTitle">(.*?)<\/div>/'

Would generally work; however, if you need to take into account other possible attributes in the div tag, it would be a little more complex.

Answer 4

Wrong answers!

preg_match('#<div\s+[^>]*class="articleTitle"[^>]*>(.*)</\s*div>#ims', $str, $matches);

1. DIV can be empty, so pattrns like (.+) are wrong.
2. you shold use "m" modifier - content can be multiline.
3. you should use "s" modifier to match dot-metacharacter as newline.
4. Just wonder, why escape slash if pattens in php can have ANY delimiter? Usually I use # as delimiter in this case.
5. DIV can have additional attributes and/or space characters (including newlines).

Sorry, have no time to test pattern good, but it seems to be correct. This should work in any case.

PS: and, GONeale, about greediness - pattern must be greedy and it IS greedy without modifier "U".