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Asked: 2026-05-23T22:33:28+00:00

I can’t seem to figure out the regular expression I need in order to

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I can’t seem to figure out the regular expression I need in order to parse the following.

<div id="MustBeInThisId">
   <div class="ValueFromThisClass">
      The Value I need
   </div>
</div>

As you can see I have a wrapping div with an id. That div contain multiple other divs but only one of those divs I need the value from.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    If you are trying to extract some data from an HTML document, you should not use regular expressions.

    Instead, you should use a DOM Parser : those are made exactly for that.

    In PHP, you would use the DOMDocument class, and its DOMDocument::loadHTML() method, to load the HTML content.

    Then, you can work with methods such as :

    You can even work with DOMXpath to execute XPath queries on your HTML content — which will allow you to search for pretty much anything in it.

    In your case, I suppose that something like this should do the trick.

    First, get your HTML content into a string (or use DOMDocument::loadHTMLFile()) :

    $html = <<<HTML
<p>hello</p>
<div>
    <div id="MustBeInThisId">
    <div class="ValueFromThisClass">
        The Value I need
    </div>
    </div>
<div>
HTML;

    Then, load it to a DOMDocument instance :

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

    Instanciate a DOMXPath object, and use it to query your DOM object :

    My XPath expression might be a bit more complex than necessary… I’m not really good with those…

    $xpath = new DOMXPath($dom);
$items = $xpath->query('//div[@id="MustBeInThisId"]/div[@class="ValueFromThisClass"]');

    And, finally, work with the results of that query :

    if ($items->length > 0) {
    var_dump( trim( $items->item(0)->nodeValue ) );
}

    And here is your result :

    string 'The Value I need' (length=16)
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