Using preg_match_all to parse a html table with PHP

Question

I use the following PHP script to parse a table.

It works if each element is on the same row, for example:

<td></td>
<td></td>
<td></td>

How can I make it work if "start tag" and "close tag" are on different rows? Like so:

<td></td>
<td>
</td>
<td></td>

PHP script:

function parseTable($html)
{
  // Find the table
  preg_match("/<table.*?>.*?<\/[\s]*table>/s", $html, $table_html);

  // Get title for each row
  preg_match_all("/<th.*?>(.*?)<\/[\s]*th>/", $table_html[0], $matches);
  $row_headers = $matches[1];

  // Iterate each row
  preg_match_all("/<tr.*?>(.*?)<\/[\s]*tr>/s", $table_html[0], $matches);

  $table = array();

  foreach($matches[1] as $row_html)
  {
    preg_match_all("/<td.*?>(.*?)<\/[\s]*td>/", $row_html, $td_matches);
    $row = array();
    for($i=0; $i<count($td_matches[1]); $i++)
    {
      $td = strip_tags(html_entity_decode($td_matches[1][$i]));
      $row[$row_headers[$i]] = $td;
    }

    if(count($row) > 0)
      $table[] = $row;
  }
  return $table;
}

Answer 1

Preg_match is not made to parse HTML since it's not a regular expression. The best solution is to use an

XML Parser - PHP Doc

Each tool has its problem to solve and parsing is not preg_match's one