Question

I want to parse an HTML document and get all users’ nicknames.

They are in this format:

<a href="/nickname_u_2412477356587950963">Nickname</a>

How can I do it using a regular expression in PHP? I can’t use DOMElement or simple HTML parsing.

Answer 1

Here is a working solution without using a regular expression:

DomDocument::loadHTML() is forgetting enough to work on malformed HTML.

<?php
    $doc = new DomDocument;
    $doc->loadHTML('<a href="/nickname_u_2412477356587950963">Nickname</a>');

    $xpath = new DomXPath($doc);
    $nodes = $xpath->query('//a[starts-with(@href, "/nickname")]');

    foreach($nodes as $node) {
        $username = $node->textContent;
        $href = $node->getAttribute('href');
        printf("%s => %s\n", $username, $href);
    }