Extracting Data between HTML Tags

[Timmins]

Input String:

<div>Current: <b>Mostly Cloudy</b>

 

I want to extract "Mostly Cloudy" from this input. So far, my code is like this:

$data="<div>Current: <b>Mostly Cloudy</b>";

preg_match_all("<div>Current: <b>((.|\n)*?)</b>",$data,$matches);

print_r($matches);

 

Unfortunately, I continually get an error that the "C" in "Current: " is an unknown modifier. This is really frustrating as i have tried looking for escape characters.. I would greatly appreciate any help!

 

Thanks!

[cags]

You have failed to include delimiters so the preg engine is assuming that your delimiters are < >. I'm guessing what you really want is something more like...

 

$data="<div>Current: <b>Mostly Cloudy</b>";
preg_match_all("#<div>Current: <b>(.*?)</b>#s",$data,$matches);
print_r($matches);

[Timmins]

Works perfectly, thanks a million! By any chance could you explain what the hash symbols and the trailing "s" do? Cheers!

[nrg_alpha]

Works perfectly, thanks a million! By any chance could you explain what the hash symbols and the trailing "s" do? Cheers!

 

The hash symbols form the delimiters.. in pcre (which utilises preg functionality), you need to have opening / closing delimiters.

 

From the introduction part of the provided link:

The expression must be enclosed in the delimiters, a forward slash (/), for example. Delimiters can be any non-alphanumeric, non-whitespace ASCII character except the backslash (\) and the null byte.

 

As for the s, this is a modifier (a modifier modifies the behavior of certain things within the pattern).  By default, the dot (.) matches anything excpet a newline.. so if you want to also match newlines with the dot, you add the s modifier after the closing delimiter. You can read up about modifiers here.

[Timmins]

Brilliant, thanks a million for your help