Question

I’m parsing information from a very long HTML table; right now the code I’m using parses using the DOMDocument, DOMElement (etc) classes. I wanted to do a performance test running the current method against Regex’ing the information out of the table but I can’t get the right expression.

An HTML row of the table looks like this:

<tr><td>   JON SMITH     </td><td> 2000-09-29 </td></tr>

And the expression I’ve been attempting looks something like this:

/(?:<td>([a-zA-Z\s]*?)<\/td><td>([0-9-\s]*?)<\/td>)/

The issue with the above expression is that it’s returning the entire row contents and not just the inner column contents. Ideally the preg_match_all array results would be name, date, name, date etc.

Is this a reasonable thing to do, or should I stick with the DOM technique? If it is reasonable, could someone lend a hand with the regex?

Thanks!

EDIT: In case anyone stumbles upon this in the future, the RegEx solution has WAY better performance than using the DOM classes; in my situation it’s the difference between seconds and minutes.

Answer 1

use preg_match_all() and pass the third parameter with the array to fill and the fourth parameter PREG_SET_ORDER.

preg_match_all("/(?:<td>([a-zA-Z\s]*?)<\/td><td>([0-9-\s]*?)<\/td>)/", $html, $matches, PREG_SET_ORDER);

The result array should be like this :

$matches => array(
   [0] => array(
      [0] => '<td>   JON SMITH     </td><td> 2000-09-29 </td>',
      [1] => '   JON SMITH     ',
      [2] => ' 2000-09-29 '
   ),
   [1] => array(
      [0] => '<td>   JACK BOLD     </td><td> 2000-10-20 </td>',
      [1] => '   JACK BOLD     ',
      [2] => ' 2000-10-20 '
   ),
   ...
);

Please refer to preg_match_all() documentation.