Question

Greetings All

I am trying to get the values in the 4th column from the left for this url. I can get all the values but it skips the first one (e.g. 30 i think is the value on top right now )

My regex is

~<td align="center" class="row2">.*<a href="javascript:who_posted.*;">([\d,]+)</a>.*</td>~isU

NOTE: HTML PARSING IS NOT AN OPTION RIGHT NOW AS THIS IS PART OF A HUGE SYSTEM AND CANNOT
BE CHANGED

Thanking you
Imran

Answer 1

You could just use:

/<a href="javascript:who_posted\(\d+\);?">([\d,]+)</a>/

As the javascript function can be exploited as a “regex selection point”

---

If you want your regex to work you need to use non-greedy expression, i.e. change .* to .*?

Also your first align match attribute in the HTML is surrounded in '' quotation marks, not "" in the HTML, for some weird inconsistent reason. Try this:

   |<td align=["\']center["\'] class="row2">.*?<a href="javascript:who_posted[^"]+">([\d,]+)</a>.*?</td>|is

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Edit:

$a = file_get_contents('http://www.zajilnet.com/forum/index.php?showforum=31');

preg_match_all('|<td align=["\']center["\'] class="row2">.*?<a href="javascript:who_posted[^"]+">([\d,]+)</a>.*?</td>|is',$a,$m);

print_r($m[1]);

---

Result:

Array
(
    [0] => 30
    [1] => 16
    [2] => 56
    [3] => 14
    [4] => 96
    [5] => 4
    [6] => 0
    [7] => 17
  [.... and more....]