scraping javascript data with simple_html_dom.php

Question

i just get this string as result from scrap a script tag from external page with simple_html_dom.php

var secs = 0; 
var lastp = 0;
var newInstance = newObjce("xxx").setup(    
"more":[{.....}], 
"sources": [
{"file":"url1","label":"360p","default":"true"},
{"file":"url2","label":"480p"},
{"file":"url3","label":"720p"},
{"file":"url4","label":"1080p HD"}
], 
"morestuff":[{......}])

how can get the data between "sources"[ ..this data...] and asign in php variable? making var_dump to this always returning string object using json_encode dont work for me because after apply and make var_dump return always string object, this is why i think regexp can help me

Answer 1

i found a solution, i discovery this page to generate regexp online http://txt2re.com/index-php.php3 , leave here the function to solve my question, if anybody need this in the future

$re1='.*?'; # Non-greedy match on filler
$re2='("sources".*?\\[.*?\\])'; # Double Quote String 1
if ($c=preg_match_all ("/".$re1.$re2."/is", $string, $matches))
{
  $string1=$matches[1][0];
  print ($string1);
 }

Answer 2

What you're looking to get done can be done with regex, but it may not be the best option. For example, you can match between the first bracket "[" after sources and the stop matching after the next close bracket after the opening one. See https://regex101.com/r/mVVEGp/1 .

However, you're risking having trouble if there is ever a close bracket before you'd expect it (eg. inside a string). You may be better off just parsing the JSON using a proper parser. json_decode is a well established native PHP implementation. There are other implementations that allow reading JSON as a stream, which would work well for large sets of data.

The short of it is regex is likely not the best option in this use case.