How can I get the content of a tag in HTML with a given attribute using regular expressions?

Question

I'd hoped to get all of the content between the tag a with class bc-de fg in a HTML file, like this:

<a class="bc-de fg"> XXXXXXXXXXXXX </a>

So I wrote the following regular expression:

$regexp = “<a\wclass="bc\wde">(.*?)<\/a>”

This does't work. I'm new to regular expressions, so I am trying to get more practice.

How can I correct this regular expression?

Cthulhu here... Use a DOM parser. – Anirudh Ramanathan Mar 07 '13 at 07:28 — Anirudh Ramanathan, Mar 07 '13 at 07:28
Related: http://stackoverflow.com/a/1732454/78845 – johnsyweb Mar 07 '13 at 07:30 — johnsyweb, Mar 07 '13 at 07:30

Nick Fury · Answer 1 · 2013-03-07T07:36:52.353

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Try something like $regex = ":<a class="bc-de fg">(.*?)</a>:mi";

I used the delimeter : So I don't have to escape forward slashes all the time
. Matches any single character except line break characters \r and \n.
*? Repeats the previous item zero or more times.

Here's a simple cheatsheet you might find useful.

edited Mar 07 '13 at 07:36

answered Mar 07 '13 at 07:27

Nick Fury

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cth · Answer 2 · 2013-03-07T07:34:56.907

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It is considered a bad practice to regex over html, or any nested structures. Use DOM instead.

Your problem in regex is the escape characters (put the regex string between single quotes). And you also have no starting and closing regex characters (#...# or \...\).

edited Mar 07 '13 at 07:34

answered Mar 07 '13 at 07:28

cth

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This was posted as an answer, but it does not attempt to answer the question. It should possibly be a comment or deleted altogether. – johnsyweb Mar 07 '13 at 07:29
Yeah I know, but I hope to use reg ex to do so... – lkkeepmoving Mar 07 '13 at 07:30
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This edit is much more like an answer ☺ – johnsyweb Mar 07 '13 at 07:50

Prasanth Bendra · Answer 3 · 2013-03-07T07:38:51.947

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Try this :

$str  = '<a class="bc-de fg">Testing</a>';

preg_match('/<a class="bc\-de\s*fg">(?P<link>.*)<\/a>/',$str,$matches);

echo "<pre>";
print_r($matches);

You will get link in $link = $matches['link'];

This will give you more accurate results :

preg_match('/<a.*class="bc\-de\s*fg".*>\s*(?P<link>.*)\s*<\/a>/',$str,$matches);

edited Mar 07 '13 at 07:38

answered Mar 07 '13 at 07:30

Prasanth Bendra

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Why can I use a whitespace directly? Should't I use \w? – lkkeepmoving Mar 07 '13 at 07:34
You can use white space but \s is the regular exp pattern for space, as you need all the text in anchor tag I used .* instead of \w – Prasanth Bendra Mar 07 '13 at 07:37

score 0 · Answer 4 · answered Mar 07 '13 at 07:30

Try this:

$regexp = '/<a class="bc-de fg">(.*)<\/a>/';
preg_match_all($regexp, $subject, $matches);

You answer will be in $matches . It should work int the scenario you just mentioned. But if the case is, if order of attributes changes or more classes are assigned, this regex wont work. Best way to do this is to use DOM instead of using regex.

score 0 · Answer 5 · answered Mar 07 '13 at 07:32

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Try [^(<a\W*class="bc\-de fg"\W*>)+(</a>)+] You can use the not ^ operator .

answered Mar 07 '13 at 07:32

Amy

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How can I get the content of a tag in HTML with a given attribute using regular expressions?

5 Answers5