Question

I’m trying to capture the following pattern “everything except data-extra”

Here is the search string :

<li data-extra="star" class = "result">a</li>
<li class = "result">b</li>
<li class = "result">c</li>
<li data-extra="star" class = "result">d</li>
<li class = "result">e</li>

And I would like to match only b, c and e (those without data-extra)

I’ve done something like this

<li(?!(data\-extra))class="result"(.*?)>

but this doesn’t work (0 result with php preg_match_all)

Answer 1

Use xpath_match_all and

$results = xpath_match_all('//li[not(@data-extra)]', $htmlString);

If you want to explicitly include the class as well, change the XPath to

//li[not(@data-extra) and @class="result"]

The $results variable will contain the innerHTML and outerHTML of the found nodes.