Question

I am trying to figure out a regular expression for the following:

<tr class="A">.*</tr><tr class="(B|C)">.*</tr>

Now The second tr class will repeat an unknown number of times, with something unknown in between repetitions, but simply putting it in parentheses and added a plus doesn’t work.

Here’s the PHP code that didn’t work:

$pattern = '/<tr\ class=\"A\">.*(<tr\ class=\"(B|C)\">.*<\/tr>.*)+/';
preg_match_all($pattern,$playerHtml,$scores);

But it only returns the first

Here’s an example of something that should match:

<tr class="A">blah</tr>blah
<tr class="B">blah</tr>blah
<tr class="B">blah</tr>blah
<tr class="C">blah</tr>

This only matches blahblahblah

Answer 1

For your particular example, this regex will do:

/<tr class="A">.*?<\/tr>.*\n?(<tr class="[BC]">.*?<\/tr>.*\n?)+/

Hope you can tweak it if need be. See the codepad demo here.

I needed to include \n newline characters for it to work.

Because they are TR elements outside of TABLE elements, I had a hard time seeing the result of the preg_match_all function (because my browser immediately stripped the random TR elements). You may have had similar problems. I used htmlspecialchars() in the demo to output the regex match.

Also, it’s improper to have text between two TR elements:

<tr></tr>blah<tr></tr>

So you should be careful about doing that.