Question

Here is the pattern that I want to match:

<div class="class">
<a href="http://www.example.com/something"> I want to be able to capture this text</a>
<span class="ptBrand">

This is what I am doing:

$pattern='{<div class="productTitle">[\n]<((https?|ftp|gopher|telnet|file|notes|ms-help):((//)|(\\\\))+[\w\d:#@%/;$()~_?\+-=\\\.&]*)>([^\n]*)</a>[\n]<span class="ptBrand">}';

preg_match($pattern, $data, $matches,PREG_OFFSET_CAPTURE);

print_r($matches);

It prints:

Array ( )

Answer 1

As a general rule, regular expressions are a really poor means of parsing HTML. They’re unreliable and tend to end up being really complicated. A far more robust solution is to use an HTML parser. See Parse HTML With PHP And DOM.

As for your expression, I don’t see <div class="productTitle" anywhere in the source so I’d start there. Likewise you’re trying to parse a URL but there’s no mention of the anchor tag (either directly or through a sufficient wildcard) so it’ll fail there too. Basically that expression doesn’t look anything like the HTML you’re trying to parse.