How come using variables in preg_match_all fails in php?

Question

I'm trying to include variables in my pattern for preg_match_all. I've tried several ways and none of them seem to work - even when the pattern is correct upon echo.

Here's what I have:

First Attempt (using single quotes to be safe):

    $pattern_areacode = '/\<a name\=\"'. $code . '\"\>'. $code . '\<\/a\>.*?(\<td\b[^>]*\>       (.*?)\<\/td\>).*?<\/tr\>/';
    preg_match_all($pattern_areacode, $contents, $ac_match);

issue: I printed the pattern and it looked fine. Yet it's not returning any results.

Second Attempt (Using double):

    $pattern_areacode = "/\<a name\=\"$code\"\>$code\<\/a\>.*?(\<td\b[^>]*\>(.*?)\<\/td\>).*?<\/tr\>/";
    preg_match_all($pattern_areacode, $contents, $ac_match);

issue: The double quotes before $ get escaped. Weird.

I did my research and tried a bunch of other ways as well, including using braces {}, but to no avail.

How do I get this to work?

Thanks!

Answer 1

Make sure your inputs are escaped and don't contain anything that regex may interpret as a pattern (which could make your match fail). This can be done easily using preg_quote . So, if you haven't already:

$code = preg_quote($quote);

Also, I recommend using an actual HTML parser as opposed to regex matches, maybe look in to using the DOMDocument