The problem with regex in php

Question

<div class="begin">...</div> 

How to match html inside (including) <div class="begin"> in PHP?

I need a regular expression solution that can handle an attached file .

Answer 1

Use DOM and DOMXPath instead of regular expression, you will thank me for this:

 // something useful: function dumpDomNode ($node) { $temp = new DOMDocument(); $temp->appendChild($node,true); return $temp->saveHTML(); } $dom = new DOMDocument(); $dom->loadHTML($html_string); $xpath-> new DOMXpath($dom); $elements = $xpath->query("*/div/[@class='begin']"); foreach ($elements as $el) { echo dumpDomNode($el); // <-- or do something more useful with it } 

Trying with regular expression will lead you to the path to madness ...

Answer 2

This , this is very good.

In short, do not use regular expressions to parse HTML. Instead, look at the DOM classes and especially DOMDocument :: loadHTML

Answer 3

Here is your regex:

 preg_match('/<div class=\"begin\">.*<\/div>/simU', $string, $matches); 

But:

• RegEx does not know which XML / HTML elements. For them, HTML is just a string. That is why the rest are right . Regex is not for DOM parsing . They are used to search for string patterns.
• I provided Regex because you are not going to parse the entire HTML page, but simply extract one specific piece of text from it, in which case Regex works great.
• If there is a nested DIV in the DIV, Regex will not work properly. If so, do not use Regex. Use one of the other solutions, because then you need a DOM parsing, not a string match.
• To search for strings with more or less clearly defined start and end values, use regular string functions instead, because they are often faster.

Answer 4

 // Create DOM from URL $html = file_get_html('http://example.org/'); echo $html->find('div.begin', 0)->outertext; 

http://simplehtmldom.sourceforge.net/manual.htm

Answer 5

here one way using string methods

 $str= <<<A blah <div class="begin"> blah blah blah blah blah </div> blah A; $s = explode("</div>",$str); foreach($s as $k=>$v){ $m=strpos($v,'<div class="begin">'); if($m !==FALSE){ echo substr("$v" ,$m); } } 

Exit

 $ php test.php <div class="begin"> blah blah blah blah blah