Can't get this number via regular expressions

PHP
1

I’m having this weird issue where after I located a number using regular expressions, I can’t convert it to an integer without it reading as 0.


//this code in php
//do next row
    $team_reb=$items2[5]->children($row+1)->children(5)->innertext;
//row is an integer, items2 is an array gotten from a find() call

//gives me this in html
<span class="nbaGIScrTot">team rebs:</span> 12

I give the html because I don’t know if the tags are messing things up.


//this in php
 preg_match('/team rebs:(.+)/',$team_reb,$matches,PREG_OFFSET_CAPTURE);
        print_r($matches);
    $team_reb=$matches[1][0];
echo gettype($team_reb).$team_reb."<br>";
//gives me this in html
Array
(
    [0] => Array
        (
            [0] => team rebs:</span> 12
            [1] => 26
        )

    [1] => Array
        (
            [0] => </span> 12
            [1] => 36
        )

)
string</span> 12

I’ve tried a bunch of different regular expressions, including stuff with (\d\d) inside to try and get the number, but for whatever reason it doesn’t find the number. I noticed the </span> stuff as well, and when I added that in before the (.+) part, it ended up giving me like 5-17 or something which is a completely different statistic on the table. If I try and convert the variable to an int before echoing it, it returns as 0 (and says the type is an integer with no warnings). This regular expression stuff can be confusing sometimes.

I’m open for ideas.

2

Provided that there will always only be one number within the string, you can use the pattern (\\d+) which will match any number 1 or more times.

Here’s the code I used to test it:


$string = '<span class="nbaGIScrTot">team rebs:</span> 12';
$pattern = "/(\\d+)/";

preg_match($pattern, $string, $matches);
var_dump($matches);

The output:


array
  0 => string '12' (length=2)
  1 => string '12' (length=2)
3

I would change the pattern to only look at the end of the string to cover any case which may have a digit in the class or who knows what.


$pattern = "/(\\d+)$/";

So you understand why you were getting zero, what you got as a match was “</span> 12” (as you saw) which in PHP is zero if converted to an integer because the first character is not a number. PHP does not give any error when converting like that. It’s how the language works.

4

Well…

It worked. I could’ve sworn I tried something like that. I know about \d. I probably did something slightly different and that’s why it didn’t work and I didn’t catch the mistake.

Thanks guys for seeing through what I thought was a complex situation and knowing the answer was really simple.