Question

i have a html like this:

......whatever very long html.....

<span class="title">hello world!</span>

......whatever very long html......

it is a very long html and i only want the content ‘hello world!’ from this html
i got this html by

$result = file_get_contents($url , false, $context);

many people were using Simple HTML DOM parser, but i think in this case, using regex would be more efficient.

how should i do it? any suggestions? any help would be really great.

thanks in advance!

Answer 1

Stick with the DOM parser – it is better. Having said that, you could use a REGEX like this…

// where the html is stored in `$html`
preg_match('/<span class="title">(.+?)<\/span>/', $html, $m);
$whatYouWant = $m[1];

preg_match() stores an array of all the elements captured inside brackets in the regex, and a 0th element which is the entire captured string. The regex is very simple in this case, being almost a direct string match for what you want, with the closing span tag’s slash escaped. The captured part just means any character (.) one or more times (+) un-greedily (?).