Question

How do I match all the <li> tags in the below HTML code:

<ul>
<li> some content</li>
<li> some other content</li>
<li> some other other content.</li>
</ul>

This expression doesn’t work:

<li>(.*)</li>

Because it returns:

some content</li>
    <li> some other content</li>
    <li> some other other content.

Which is the content between the first <li> and the last </li>

Answer 1

Regular expressions are greedy by nature. Make it non-greedy by adding the ?.

<li>(.*?)</li>

Note: I’d encourage a DOM Parser for such a thing. Check out PHP’s DOMDocument.