Question

Hi i want to retrieve certain information from a website.

This is what is display on the website with html tags.

    <a href="ProductDisplay?catalogId=10051&amp;storeId=90001&amp;productId=258033&amp;langId=-1" id="WC_CatalogSearchResultDisplay_Link_6_3" class="s_result_name">

                                                                SALT - Fine
</a>

What i want to extract is “SALT – FINE” using preg match however i do not know why i cant use it. isit because they are all on different line? cos i realise if they are on a single line i can actually retrieve what i want.

This is my code –

$pattern = '/id="WC_CatalogSearchResultDisplay_Link_6_3.*<\/a>/';
preg_match_all($pattern, $response, $match);
print_r($match);

I do not get anything in my array. if they are on a single line it works?.why is that so?

Answer 1

Have a look at:

http://www.php.net/manual/en/reference.pcre.pattern.modifiers.php

especially the m and s modifiers.

Also, I would recommend, changing the pattern to something like:

$pattern = '/id="WC_CatalogSearchResultDisplay_Link_6_3"[^>]*>(.*)<\/a>/ims';

Otherwise, you’ll match the end of your a-tag.

And on a side note, don’t use regex to parse html/xml.

Something like this:

<?php
$dom = DOMDocument::loadHtml($response);
$xpath = new DOMXPath($dom);

$node = $xpath->query('//*[@id="WC_CatalogSearchResultDisplay_Link_6_3"]/text()')->item(0);
if ($node instanceof DOMText) {
    echo trim($node->nodeValue);
}

will also work, and will be a lot more robust.