Preg_match

PHP
1

I am kinda beginner in regular expressions.

Could anyone help me out? I wanna get as an output “Stephen” word.

<td width=20%>Name:</td><td>Stephen <div style="float: right"></div></td>
2 

preg_match("#<td width=20%>Name:</td><td>([\\w^<]+)#", $search_string, $matches);

Didn’t test it, might not work.

3

Unfortunately , does not work.

4 

$str = '<td width=20%>Name:</td><td>Stephen <div style="float: right"></div></td>';

preg_match("#<td width=20%>Name:</td><td>([\\w^<]+)#", $str, $matches);

var_dump($matches);

Works perfectly fine for me.

5

You’re right.

For this spare of code it works.
But im fetching first:



preg_match(
      "@<TABLE BORDER=0 CELLSPACING=1 CELLPADDING=4 WIDTH=100%>
       <TR BGCOLOR=#505050><TD COLSPAN=2 CLASS=white>
       <B>Informations</B>.+?</TABLE>@is", $website, $matches );
    $getinfo = $matches[0];

$website is a variable of the site I am connecting to.

Then I am trying to fetch the data included in this table.

preg_match("@<td width=20%>Name:</td><td>([\\w^<]+)@", $getinfo, $matches);

Maybe 1st preg_match should be fixed?

6

Your regular expression (the 1st one) won’t capture anything in the $matches variable since you’re not using any () to actually put the contents of the matched string inside a variable.
Also, you need $matches[1], not $matches[0].

7

How it should be fixed then?

8

If you are parsing complex HTML, take a long, hard look at Simple HTML DOM instead of writing regular expressions:

http://simplehtmldom.sourceforge.net/

Tables without classes do present a problem for selectors but is still a lot easier to navigate than parsing HTML yourself.

9

Seems very useful , need only explore some functions I need.