A doubt about php's preg_match result.

**Cory** · 27th May 2011, 12:39 PM

Created: test.php

PHP Code:


<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">

<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">

<head>

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />

<title>Untitled Document</title>

</head>



<body>

<?php



echo '<table width="50%" border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0">

  <tr>

    <td>Welcome to:</td>

  </tr>

  <tr>

    <td><strong>Hell</strong></td>

  </tr>

</table>';



?>

</body>

</html>

Created: curl.php

PHP Code:


<?php

error_reporting(-1);  



$curlTarget = "http://127.0.0.1/test.php";



$ch = curl_init();

curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL,$curlTarget);

curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER,1);



$result = curl_exec ($ch);

curl_close($ch);



preg_match ("/(<strong)(.*?)(>)(.*?)(<\/strong>)/i", $result, $match);

echo $match[4];



?>

Test: http://djdog2006.com/curl/test.php
Curl: http://djdog2006.com/curl/curl.php

**JmZ** · 27th May 2011, 02:23 PM

Seriously this is like watching regex being mutilated into some evil devil child lol.

It *SHOULD* be (for the html above, to match just the contents of strong):

Code:

#<strong>([^<]+)</strong>#i

I don't know why anyone is matching two wildcards, strong doesn't have attributes (unless you're some insane guy who gives strong tags style attributes).

As for your original post it would've been:

Code:

#<td>Welcome to:</td>\s*<td>([^<]+)</td>#i

Why you decided to make the whitespace it's own variable, Lock Down, I do not know. It isn't even whitespace.

This:

Code:

[\s\S]*

is the same as this:

Code:

.*

Any amount of non-whitespace or whitespace characters == any amount of any characters.

**Lock Down** · 27th May 2011, 03:35 PM

Regex is some evil devil STEP child !!

**PCManiac** · 27th May 2011, 05:24 PM

Thank you fore your replies guys.
The replies + my fiddling with my sources @work computer made me see that something in my system is messing with my xampp php install so I will be reinstalling from scratch on a virtual box properly.

Yet, I have a question JMZ, what does the ([^>]+) and ([^<]+) means? I have seen it over and over on other sites but I can't find a proper description for that.

**Cory** · 27th May 2011, 06:50 PM

That's what I did in my example;

If I was coding this myself, I would use;

<strong id="identify" and display that in there so I know what it's actually getting.

**JmZ** · 28th May 2011, 09:03 AM

Originally Posted by PCManiac

Yet, I have a question JMZ, what does the ([^>]+) and ([^<]+) means? I have seen it over and over on other sites but I can't find a proper description for that.

Code:

[^<]+

Means one or more characters which aren't '<'.
Quick way of matching things inside tags, but it will break with nested tags.

A doubt about php's preg_match result.

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