Question

I have this XML content:

$XML = "<item xmlns='http://...'>Some value</item>";

I want to extract the value off the tag, so I use the following regular expression:

$Value = preg_replace("/^<item [.]+>/","",$XML);
$Value = preg_replace("/</item>$/","",$Value);

But these don’t work, the $Value finally is still the same as $XML. How to fix this?

Answer 1

If you want to extract the text inside the tag you can use this code:

$string = "<item xmlns='http://...'>Some value</item>";
$regex = '#<.*?>(.*?)</.*?>#';
preg_match_all($regex, $string, $matches);
$matches = $matches[1][0];
echo $matches;

If you want to use preg_replace, use this code:

$Value = preg_replace("/^<item .+?>/","",$XML);
$Value = preg_replace("/<\/item>$/","",$Value);