preg_match - text between closing and opening tag

Question

I've very odd task to do.

I need to grab text from html tags using preg_match() function in PHP. Problem is that text I need is between closing and opening html tags or this text with tags.

Below is my html string:

<h2>Title of post</h2> 1 category <strong>task 1</strong> 1 category <strong>task 2</strong> 1 category <strong>task 3</strong>&nbsp; 

To be more specific: I need string " 1 category " between </h2> and <strong> tag.

When i try to grab text between opening and closing tags - It's working fine and I'm using this function:

preg_match_all('#<strong>(.*?)</strong>#',$string,$matches);

I've tried many combinations to get text between closing and opening tags. None of them worked out. I've ended using function like this:

preg_match_all('#<\/strong>(.*?)<strong>#',$content,$matches_all);

With no results.

The strange thins is that on online regex testers this function with above pattern with above function works sometimes.

Do I have bad pattern? Am I missing some flags? Do you know what can be best way to get text in this way? Unfortunately I have to do with Regex approach, the solutions like XMLDomParser is not allowed in my case.

Thanks a lot for help.

Answer 1

Try this one.

preg_match_all('/<([^>]+)>(?:([^<]+))*(?=[^>]*\<)/',$string,$matches);

Live Demo

Answer 2

Looks like something wrong with your php installation/configuration.

Your code as it's.

$content = '<h2>Title of post</h2> 1 category <strong>task 1</strong> 1 category <strong>task 2</strong> 1 category <strong>task 3</strong>&nbsp;'; 
preg_match_all('#<\/h2>(.*?)<strong>#',$content,$matches);
print_r($matches);

Output:

Array
(
    [0] => Array
        (
            [0] => </h2> 1 category <strong>
        )

    [1] => Array
        (
            [0] =>  1 category 
        )

)

Live demo

Note : Since there is only one match of your pattern ( between </h2> <strong> ) you can access like $maches[1][0] or use preg_match .

Answer 3

If you want all pieces of text between a closing and opening tag, you could use this code. Note that I changed your text so that the text between each set of closing/opening tags was different so that it was more obvious that the match was finding each value.

$str = '<h2>Title of post</h2> 1 category <strong>task 1</strong> 2 category <strong>task 2</strong> 3 category <strong>task 3</strong> ';
preg_match_all('#(?:</[^>]+>)(.*?)<#', $str, $matches);
print_r($matches[1]);

Output:

Array
(
    [0] =>  1 category 
    [1] =>  2 category 
    [2] =>  3 category 
)