Question

I’m trying to match a string in a HTML source code with starting <!--sliderStart--> and ending <!--sliderEnd-->

Example1:

<!--sliderStart-->
<p>blah</p>
<p>blah2</p>
<!--sliderEnd-->

Example2:

<!--sliderStart--><p>blah</p><p>blah2</p><!--sliderEnd-->

This is my pattern, but it’s not working efficiently:

$pattern = "/<!--sliderStart-->[^\n]+(.*?)<!--sliderEnd-->/";

What’s the exact pattern for this matching?

Answer 1

Regular expression dots don’t match newlines unless you tell them to. You need a s modifier at the end of your regex, like so:

$pattern = '/<!--sliderStart-->(.*?)<!--sliderEnd-->/s';