Question

I want to extract from a string containing html content, text between the first occurrence of (<a> and <span> tags).

My pattern is as following :

$pattern='/<a[^(span)][\/\(\)-:@!%*>#=_|?$&";.\w\s]+<\/a> <span/um';

I get the output as text between 1st occurrence of <a and last occurrence of <span and not text between 1st occurrence of both.

eg, html content:

<a href="#">asdasdasd</a> <span blah blah></span> blah blah <a>blah  </a> <span>blah

Want:

<a href="#">asdasdasd</a> <span

Getting:

<a href="#">asdasdasd</a> <span blah blah></span> blah blah <a>blah  </a> <span

Answer 1

1. Use a HTML parser for parsing HTML
2. Use lazy quantifier '/<a[^(span)][\/\(\)-:@!%*>#=_|?$&";.\w\s]+?<\/a> <span/um';