Regex Repeating Pattern to Capture All HTML Table Column Contents

Question

I am attempting to capture all column contents within HTML tables. I'm very close, but my regex is only capturing the first column of each table. What do I need to do to capture all of the columns?

Here is my regex and HTML: https://regex101.com/r/jA3sS6/1

Answer 1

Don't use regular expression, use a Parser instead!

Start with this:

$dom = new DOMDocument();
libxml_use_internal_errors(1);
$dom->loadHTML( $html );
$xpath = new DOMXPath( $dom );

To retrieve all <td> :

foreach( $dom->GetElementsByTagName( 'td' ) as $td )
{
    echo $td->nodeValue . PHP_EOL;
}

To retrieve all <td class="large-text"> :

foreach( $xpath->query( '//td[@class="large-text"]' ) as $td )
{
    echo $td->nodeValue . PHP_EOL;
}

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• Read more about DOMDocument
• Read more about DOMXPath
• Read why you can't parse [X]HTML with regular expressions