PHP preg_match to grab text in between two HTML tags

Question

I'm trying to use preg_match to grab the text in between two HTML tags.

Here's a simplified version of my code:

 $sPattern = "/<li class=\"sample\">(.*?)<\/li>/s";
 $sText = "blah blah blah <li class=\"sample\">hello world!</li> blah blah blah";
 preg_match($sPattern,$sText,$aMatch);
 echo '<pre>'.print_r($aMatch).'</pre>';

However, when I run this code, I get the full HTML string returned:

<li class=\"sample\">hello world!</li>

Does anyone know what changes I need to make to my regular expression?

Note: I'm aware of other ways to parse data from an HTML page. For various reasons, DOMDocument and DOMXPath are not an option--I'm sticking with RegEx.

Answer 1

This should work how you want:

$sPattern = "/<li class=\"sample\">(.*?)<\/li>/s";
$sText = "blah blah blah <li class=\"sample\">hello world!</li> blah blah blah";
preg_match($sPattern,$sText,$aMatch);
echo '<pre>'.$aMatch[1].'</pre>';

Answer 2

You need to access the capturing group output.

var_dump( $aMatch[1]);

Here is a demo showing that the regex is working fine, you're just accessing the resulting array incorrectly.