going insane!

[Rifts]

I have tried a ton of different ways to get text between tags with no luck.

 

Here is the code

 

preg_match_all('/<td class=\"word fixed_text\".*td>/', $result, $matches1);

 

I'm trying to get the text between

 

<td class="word fixed_text"> *HERE* </td>

 

can anyone see why that isnt working?

 

when I echo out the $result everything is there so I know thats not the problem.

 

thanks

 

[ManiacDan]

What exactly is the issue?  Your code works fine for me, it matches the whole TD ... /TD space.  If you're actually trying to match INSIDE the tags, you need to add the > and < and use parens to make a capture group.

[batwimp]

preg_match_all('/<td class=\"word fixed_text\">(.*)<.*td>/', $result, $matches1);

[AyKay47]

$pattern = '~<td class="word fixed_text">([^<]*)</td>~i';

[ragax]

Hi Rifts!

 

Interesting, you have exactly the same problem as Codemunkie on the other post from today.

 

This is an old, classic problem (which I've more fully described on my page about greedy and lazy quantifiers).

 

Basically, your dot-star (.*) before "td" is "greedy": it will cause the regex engine to match every single character until the end of the string. Then, to match "td", the engine will roll back character by character until it finds a "td", which will be the very last "td" on your string. This means the match may swallow many tags in a row.

 

If you want to use a dot-star for this task (and there are multiple ways of doing it), that is fine, but you need to make the star lazy by adding a question mark.

 

Here is some working code:

 

Code:

<?php
$string='
<td class="word fixed_text">HERE</td>
<td class="word fixed_text">HERE 2</td>
<td class="word fixed_text">HERE TOO</td>
';
$regex=',class="word fixed_text">(.*?)</td>,';
preg_match_all($regex, $string, $matches, PREG_PATTERN_ORDER);
$sz=count($matches[1]);
for ($i=0;$i<$sz;$i++) 
echo $matches[1][$i]."<br />";
?>

 

Output:

HERE

HERE 2

HERE TOO

 

Please let me know if you have any questions!