Question

I’ve got a problem. I need to find different text tables in text like:

+--------------------+--------------------+---------------------+
|  Some data         |  Some results      |   Some things       |
|                    |                    |      (modules)      |
+--------------------+--------------------+---------------------+
|                    |                    |                     |
|                    |                    +---------------------+
|                    |                    |                     |
|                    +--------------------+---------------------+
|                    |                    |                     |
|                    |                    +---------------------+
|                    |                    |                     |
|                    +--------------------+---------------------+
|                    |                    |                     |
|                    |                    +---------------------+
|                    |                    |                     |
+--------------------+--------------------+---------------------+
|                    |                    |                     |
|                    |                    +---------------------+
|                    |                    |                     |
|                    +--------------------+---------------------+
|                    |                    |                     |
|                    |                    +---------------------+
|                    |                    |                     |
|                    +--------------------+---------------------+
|                    |                    |                     |
|                    |                    +---------------------+
|                    |                    |                     |
+--------------------+--------------------+---------------------+

or like

+--------------+--------------+-------------+----------+-----------+
|    Name      |Age           |  Possible   | Good     | Bad       |
|              |              |             |          |           |
+--------------+--------------+-------------+----------+-----------+
|      1       |      2       |      3      |    4     |     5     |
+--------------+--------------+-------------+----------+-----------+
|              Allgood things                          |           |
+--------------+--------------+-------------+----------+-----------+
|              |              |             |          |           |
+--------------+--------------+-------------+----------+-----------+

I am trying to find every thing starting with +– which ends with -+ and after come white spaces or words or numbers like this:

$pattern = '/\+(-)+(.*)(-+\+[\s\d\w]+)/mis';
preg_match_all($pattern, $this->document, $matches);

I found content starting from one table beginning till last table end. But I want to find all tables in document.

Please help.

Answer 1

Try this

^[\+-]+$(\s*^[+|].*?$)*

See it here on Regexr

This will find a table that starts with a row consisting of + and -. The ^ matches the start of the row and the $ matches the end of the row. The there is a whitespace, this is needed to match the newline characters.
Then comes a group that defines a row in a table: It has to start with a + or a |, then there can be any character till the end of the row. This complete group will be be repeated till there is a row not starting with one of those characters.