PHP中的regexp出现问题

Question

Funny that my last question was on the same topic, but alas:

I'm running the following code:

preg_match('/<th.*>.*Organizer.*title=\".*\">(.*)<\/a>/mi', $file_string, $organizer);

On the following content:

<tr>
<th valign="top"> Organizer:
</th>
<td style="width:55%;"> <a href="/starcraft2/TaKe" title="TaKe">TaKe</a>
</td></tr>

And I can't for the life of me figure out why it's not working. I can get it to match Organizer: with the regexp '/.*Organizer', but it seems that as soon as there's a new line it stops to work, despite having the /m option. Any ideas?

Answer 1

Okay so the issue is the new-line constant, however this Regex will get the text of the a element:

<th.*|\n>.*|\nOrganizer.*|\n*title=".*">(.*)<\/a>

Take note to the expression *|\\n .

Here is a Regex 101 to prove it.

---

As Niet stated, you could just use the s modifier. The Regex would then be:

<th.*>.*Organizer.*title=".*">(.*)<\/a>

but you would send in an additional modifier - s . Here is a Regex 101 to prove it.

Answer 2

The dot metacharacter, by default, does not match newlines. If you also want . to match newlines, you need the s modifier.

From the PHP manual :

If this modifier is set, a dot metacharacter in the pattern matches all characters, including newlines . Without it, newlines are excluded.

However, it's generally a bad idea to use regex to parse HTML. I suggest you use a DOM Parser instead.