Question

I have the following piece of code which should match the provided string to $contents. $contents variable has a web page contents stored through file_get_contents() function:

if (preg_match('~<p style="margin-top: 40px; " class="head">GENE:<b>(.*?)</b>~iU', $contents, $match)){
                    $found_match = $match[1];
                }

The original string on the said webpage looks like this:

<p style="margin-top: 40px; " class="head">GENE:<b>TSPAN6</b>

I would like to match and store the string ‘TSPAN6’ found on the web page through (.*?) into $match[1]. However, the matching does not seem to work. Any ideas?

Answer 1

Unfortunately, your suggestion did not work.

After some hours of looking through the html code I have realized that the regex simply had a blank space right after the colon. As such, the code snippet now looks like this:

$pattern = '#GENE: <b>(.*)</b>#i';
preg_match($pattern1, $contents, $match1);
if (isset($match1[1]))
{
    $found_flag = $match1[1];
}