Question

I’m trying to capture the text “Capture This” in $string below.

$string = "</th><td>Capture This</td>";
$pattern = "/<\/th>\r.*<td>(.*)<\/td>$/";

preg_match ($pattern, $string, $matches);

echo($matches);

However, that just returns “Array”. I also tried printing $matches using print_r, but that gave me “Array ( )”.

This pattern will only come up once, so I just need it to match one time. Can somebody please tell me what I’m doing wrong?

Answer 1

The problem is that you require a CR character \r. Also you should make the search lazy inside the capturing group and use print_r to output the array. Like this:

$pattern = "/<\/th>.*<td>(.*?)<\/td>$/";

You can see it in action here: http://codepad.viper-7.com/djRJ0e

Note that it’s recommended to parse html with a proper html parser rather than using regex.