preg_match between html tags

Question

I need to grab the names between the html tags.

<div class="from"><span class="profile fn">firstnamed familyname</span></div>

so far I tried according to examples from other poeple with the same question:

preg_match(";from"><span class="profile fn>(.?)</span></div>;", $text, $match)

but it doesn't work.

What is the correct way?

Thanks a lot.

Answer 1

preg_match(";from"><span class="profile fn>(.?)</span></div>;", $text, $match)

... should trigger this:

Parse error: syntax error, unexpected '<'

Apart from that:

• You seek for an unclosed attribute that's not in the original text:

  class="profile fn vs class="profile fn"

• You seek for zero or one characters:

  .?

Fixed regexp would be:

$text = '<div class="from"><span class="profile fn">firstnamed familyname</span></div>';
preg_match(';from"><span class="profile fn">(.*)</span></div>;', $text, $match);
var_dump($match);

Of course, this will probably break on large HTML documents (as soon as there's another </span></div> bit later on). Regular expressions are impossible to get right when used for parsing HTML.

Answer 2

This:

preg_match(";from"><span class="profile fn>(.?)</span></div>;", $text, $match)

is syntactically incorrect, you have to escape the double quotes:

preg_match(";from\"><span class=\"profile fn>(.?)</span></div>;", $text, $match)

Answer 3

您需要转义特殊字符（例如引号）：

preg_match(";from\"><span class\=\"profile fn>(.?)</span></div>;", $text, $match)