Regex PCRE expression

Question

I have a piece of html code like the following one:

<td width="24%"><b>Something</b></td>
          <td width="1%"></td>
          <td width="46%" align="center">
           <p><b>
    needed
  value</b></p>
          </td>
          <td width="28%" align="center">
            &nbsp;</td>
        </tr>

What is a good regex pattern to extract the first text node (not tags but the text inside) after the word Something I mean I want to extract

     needed
  value

and nothing more.

I cant figure out a working regex pattern in php.

EDIT: I am not parsing whole html document but few lines of it so all I want is to do it using Regex and no HTML parsers.

Answer 1

Ignoring potential issues parsing HTML with regex, the following pattern should match your example code:

Something(?:(?:<[^>]+>)|\s)*([\w\s*]+)

This will match Something , followed by any list of HTML tags (or whitespace) and match the very next block of text, \\w (including whitespace).

You can use this in PHP's preg_match() method like this:

if (preg_match('/Something(?:(?:<[^>]+>)|\s)*([\w\s*]+)/', $inputString, $match)) {
    $matchedValue = $match[1];
    // do whatever you need
}

Regex Explained:

Something         # has to start with 'Something'
(?:               # non-matching group
    (?:           # non-matching group
        <[^>]+>   # any HTML tags, <...>
    )
    | \s          # OR whitespace
)*                # this group can match 0+ times
(
    [\w\s*]+      # any non-HTML words (with/without whitespace)
)