正则表达式php在html标签中找到一个字符

Question

I'm stuck on a stubborn problem I can't seem to solve.

I'm trying to find a specific character only when it is inside an html tag (not between).

To test this I have 2 test strings:

1. a string with NO HTML. this is sentence 2.
2. a string with HTML. this is <a href="www.somesite.com">sentence</a>

I'd like to find all the period characters within < > html tags so the match should be 2 periods within www.somesite.com, I cannot get the match correctly. Can someone please take a look at my regex and see what I am missing?

(<[^>]*>?(\.))>?

Answer 1

Try this:

$re = "/>[^<]*<(*SKIP)(*F)|searchText/mi";   //before | part avoid tag inner text and after | part search only tag inside text.
$str = "<div><a href=\"www.searchText.com\">This is <a href=\"www.searchText.com\">sentence</a> tI want to test.</a></div>";

preg_match_all($re, $str, $matches);

Demo

Answer 2

Given the string " This is <a href="www.somesite.com">sentence</a> I want to test. " the regex:

\.(?=\w)

will match the periods in the URL but not at the end of the sentence. Note that the regex is not URL specific, it just finds a period followed immediately by a word character using a positive lookahead.

Having said that you should really be parsing HTML with something like PHPDomDocument