Question

I am trying this regex pattern:

$string = '<div class="className">AlwaysTheSame:</div>Subtitle <br /><span class="anotherClass">entry1</span><span class="anotherClass">entry2</span><span class="anotherClass">entry3</span>';
preg_match_all('|<div class="className">AlwaysTheSame:</div>(.*?)<br />(<span class="anotherClass">(.*?)</span>)*|', $string, $matches);
print_r($matches);
exit;

The <span class="anotherClass">entry</span> can not exists or exists multiple times, the pattern seems to match it fine works both when exists and when it doesn’t, but the output is:

Array
(
    [0] => Array
        (
            [0] => <div class="className">AlwaysTheSame:</div>Subtitle <br /><span class="anotherClass">entry1</span><span class="anotherClass">entry2</span><span class="anotherClass">entry3</span>
        )

    [1] => Array
        (
            [0] => Subtitle 
        )

    [2] => Array
        (
            [0] => <span class="anotherClass">entry3</span>
        )

    [3] => Array
        (
            [0] => entry3
        )

)

Array[0][0] contains the full string so its matching all I need, but in Array[2] and [3] I only get the last <span...

How can I get all those <span... in the output array and not just the last one?

Answer 1

You can’t directly, at least not in PHP. Repeated capturing groups always contain the last expression they matched. The exception is .NET where regex matches have an additional property that allows you to access every single match of a repeated group. Also, Perl 6 can do something like this – but not PHP.

Solution: Use

~<div class="className">AlwaysTheSame:</div>(.*?)<br />((?:<span class="anotherClass">(.*?)</span>)*)~

Now the second capturing group contains all the <span> tags. With another regex you can then extract all the matches:

~(?<=<span class="anotherClass">).*?(?=</span>)~

I’m using ~ as a regex delimiter, by the way – using | is confusing IMO.