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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-06-06T13:09:36+00:00

I have a content string that starts with an unordered list I want to

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I have a content string that starts with an unordered list I want to make a summary of this content on my homepage and I need to match the first unordered list and only show 5 list items in the preview, so I stated with matching the whole ul tag using this regex:

/<\s*ul[^>]*>(.*?)<\s*/\s*ul>/s

it works fine in regex tester online but I get Unknown modifier ‘\’ and I don’t know which one ? also after getting the whole unordered list how can I choose only the first 5 list items for example:

<ul class="mylist">
    <li>Lorem Ipsum Dolor Sit Amet</li>
    <li>Lorem Ipsum Dolor Sit Amet</li>
    <li>Lorem Ipsum Dolor Sit Amet</li>
    <li>Lorem Ipsum Dolor Sit Amet</li>
    <li>Lorem Ipsum Dolor Sit Amet</li>
    <li>Lorem Ipsum Dolor Sit Amet</li>
    <li>Lorem Ipsum Dolor Sit Amet</li>
    <li>Lorem Ipsum Dolor Sit Amet</li>
    <li>Lorem Ipsum Dolor Sit Amet</li>
    <li>Lorem Ipsum Dolor Sit Amet</li>
</ul>

and I want to create the same one with only the first 5 <li> tags, so should I use regex or some other methods in php ?

and thanks in advance.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team
    /<\s*ul[^>]*>(.*?)<\s*/\s*ul>/s

    you need to escape the / if you use it as the delimiter.

    /<\s*ul[^>]*>(.*?)<\s*\/\s*ul>/s

    in PHP you can use any character as the delimiter, though:

    #<\s*ul[^>]*>(.*?)<\s*/\s*ul>#s

    You can repeat a pattern:

    #<\s*ul[^>]*>(\s*<li>.+?</li>){5}#sm

    will match 5 <li>s. You won’t be able to access them seperately, though. You can either unroll that repeated-group, or run a second expression to extract the <li>s.

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