Question

I’m using preg_match function in PHP in order to extract some values from a RSS Feed. Inside this feed content there is something like this:

<li><strong>Something:</strong> A text with non alphanumeric characters (more text), more text with non alphanumeric characters (more text)</li>

I need to get those “A text with non alphanumeric characters” and “more text with non alphanumeric characters” to save them in a database. I don’t know if using regular expressions is the best way to do it.

Thank you so much.

Answer 1

If you want to use regex (i.e. quick and dirty, not really too maintainable), this will give you the text:

$input = '<li><strong>Something:</strong> A text with non alphanumeric characters (more text), more text with non alphanumeric characters (more text)</li>';

// Match between tags
preg_match("#</strong>(.*?)</li>#", $input, $matches);
// Remove the text inside brackets
echo trim(preg_replace("#\s*\(.*?\)\s*#", '', $matches[1]));

Though, nested brackets may fail.