Question

I can’t figure out how get only those ‘div’-s (with content) which don’t contain other div(s).

For example:

<div id='first'>
    ...
    <div id='second'> 
        ...
    </div> 
</div> 
<div id='third'> 
    ...
</div>

And I need only the ‘second’ and ‘third’ divs’ content, opening and closing tags because they don’t include other divs.

I tried this pattern: ~(<div id='[a-z].+')(.*?)(</div>)~s
But it’s not ok.

I hope I’am clear… thank you in advance!!

Answer 1

While I’m not a Nazi about using rexex to extract HTML, this problem is a lot easier with xpath and the DOM.

$dom = new DomDocument();
$dom->loadHTML($html);

$xpath = new DOMXPath($dom);
$divs = $xpath->query("//div[not(div)]");

I didn’t test that code. But the key part is the not operator that finds all divs without a div childnode.