regex + php, match new line html

[citricsquid]

Hello, regex makes my head hurt.

 

If I have:

<div id="this">HELLO!</div>

and I want to find out what's between <div id="this"></div> I'd just do:

preg_match('%<div id="this">(.*?)</div>%sm', $string, $result);

and it works fine, but if I have:

<div id="this">
<div id="subthis">
hello
</div>
</div>

 

and I want to get the contents of the div "this", it doesn't work. I'm assuming this is because of newlines and any whitespace. How would I avoid this?

[cags]

It makes my head hurt also. In your particular case. The question mark makes the search lazy meaning it will exit at the first occurance of </div> which is obviously not what your after. I don't have experience of working with nested tags though so I'm not sure of the solution. In your example remove the question mark will work, but since there could well be another div outside that it's not a solution. You'd potentially have to use a recursive call to preg_match. In your case however it could potentially be easier using a method other than regular expressions. Depends on your requirements, but there's potentially a way to just parse it as an xml dom.

[.josh]

at best, regex sucks at nested tags (or nested anything for that matter), use DOM