Question

I have a question about a regular function that is giving me grief. I have a list of items that is separated in tags. I am trying to extract everything between two particular tags (which occur multiple times). Here is a sample of the list I am parsing:

<ResumeResultItem_V3>
    <ResumeTitle>Johnson</ResumeTitle>
    <RecentEmployer>University of Phoenix</RecentEmployer>
    <RecentJobTitle>Advisor</RecentJobTitle>
    <RecentPay>40000</RecentPay>
</ResumeResultItem_V3>

<ResumeResultItem_V3>
    <ResumeTitle>ResumeforJake</ResumeTitle>
    <RecentEmployer>APEX</RecentEmployer>
    <RecentJobTitle>Consultant</RecentJobTitle>
    <RecentPay>66000</RecentPay>
</ResumeResultItem_V3>

I’m trying to get everything in between “ResumeResultItem_V3” as a blob of text, but I can’t seem to get the expression right.

Here is the code I have so far:

$test = "(<ResumeResultItem_V3>)";
$test2 = "(<\/ResumeResultItem_V3>)";

preg_match_all("/" . $test . "(\w+)" . $test2 . "/", $xml, $matches);

foreach ($matches[0] as $match) {
       echo $match;
       echo "<br /><br />";
}

How can I fix this?

Answer 1

You are probably better off with simplexml for extracting the data here.

But to also answer the regex question. \w+ only matches word-characters. But in this case you want it to match pretty much everything in between the delimeters, which .*? can be used for.

preg_match_all("/$test(.*?)$test2/s", $xml, $matches);

Only works with the /s modifier though.