Question

I want to extract a string between two other strings. The strings happen to be within HTML tags but I would like to avoid a conversation about whether I should be parsing HTML with regex (I know I shouldn’t and have solved the problem with stristr() but would like to know how to do it with regular expressions.

A string might look like this:

...uld select &#8220;Apply&#8221; below.<br/><br/><b>Primary Location</b>: United States-Washington-Seattle<br/><b>Travel</b>: Yes, 75 % of the Time <br/><b>Job Type</b>: Standard<br/><b>Region</b>: US Service Lines: ASL - Business Intelligence<br/><b>Job</b>: Business Intelligence<br/><b>Capability Group</b>: Con/Sol - BI&C<br/><br/>LOC:USA

I am interested in <b>Primary Location</b>: United States-Washington-Seattle<br/> and want to extract ‘United States-Washington-Seattle’

I tried '(?<=<b>Primary Location</b>:)(.*?)(?=<br/>)' which worked in RegExr but not PHP:

preg_match("/(?<=<b>Primary Location</b>:)(.*?)(?=<br/>)/", $description,$matches);

Answer 1

You used / as regex delimiter, so you need to escape it if you want to match it literally or use a different delimiter

 preg_match("/(?<=<b>Primary Location</b>:)(.*?)(?=<br/>)/", $description,$matches);

to

preg_match("/(?<=<b>Primary Location<\/b>:)(.*?)(?=<br\/>)/", $description,$matches);

or this

preg_match("~(?<=<b>Primary Location</b>:)(.*?)(?=<br/>)~", $description,$matches);

Update

I just tested it on http://www.writecodeonline.com/php and

$description = "uld select “Apply” below.<br/><br/><b>Primary Location</b>: United States-Washington-Seattle<br/><b>Travel</b>: Yes, 75 % of the Time <br/><b>Job Type</b>: Standard<br/><b>Region</b>: US Service Lines: ASL - Business Intelligence<br/><b>Job</b>: Business Intelligence<br/><b>Capability Group</b>: Con/Sol - BI&C<br/><br/>LOC:USA";
preg_match("~(?<=<b>Primary Location</b>:)(.*?)(?=<br/>)~", $description, $matches);

print_r($matches);

is working. Output:

Array ( [0] => United States-Washington-Seattle [1] => United States-Washington-Seattle )

You can also get rid of the capturing group and do

$description = "uld select “Apply” below.<br/><br/><b>Primary Location</b>: United States-Washington-Seattle<br/><b>Travel</b>: Yes, 75 % of the Time <br/><b>Job Type</b>: Standard<br/><b>Region</b>: US Service Lines: ASL - Business Intelligence<br/><b>Job</b>: Business Intelligence<br/><b>Capability Group</b>: Con/Sol - BI&C<br/><br/>LOC:USA";
preg_match("~(?<=<b>Primary Location</b>:).*?(?=<br/>)~", $description, $matches);

print($matches[0]);

Output

United States-Washington-Seattle