Question

I have a string like this in PHP

<li>bla bla bla bla</li>
<li>hello hello</li>
<li>the brown fox didnt jump</li>
.
.
.
<li>aaaaaaarghhhh</li>

I want to get a string wich contains the first X li’s (li tags included in the result string)

<li>.....first one....</li>
<li>.....second one....</li>
<li>.................</li>
<li>.....X one....</li>

How can this be done with REGEX or something else????

I could remove the

</li>

then explode by

<li>

and get the first X elements of array and then adding again li tags at beginning and at end of each element, but i think its too dirty…

Any better ideas?

Answer 1

See if this regex works for you (replace the number 2 with the required number of li):

((?:<li>.*?<\/li>){2})