Question

Possible Duplicate:
Best methods to parse HTML with PHP

for example i have a html code like :

<table width="100%" border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" class="rowData">
  <tr align="center" class="fnt-vrdana-mavi" >
            <td style="font-size:11px" colspan=3><b>Text text text</b>:3</td>
        </tr>

        <tr class="header" align="center">
            <td height="18" colspan="3">Text text text</td>

        </tr>
        <tr align="center" class="fnt-vrdana" bgcolor="#eff3f4" height="18">
            <td width="32%" height="17"><b>1</b></td>
            <td width="34%"><b>0</b></td>
            <td width="34%"><b>2</b></td>
        </tr>
        <tr align="center" class="fnt-vrdana-mavi">

            <td height="17">2.90</td>
            <td>3.20</td>
            <td>1.85</td>
        </tr>
</table>

Which is best regular expression to match all data from inside <td> tags?

Answer 1

I normally suggest if you need to actually express what you’re looking for in a HTML document to use an xpath expression for that because it can give you the actual value whereas regex’es are not able to further parse the HTML/XML, and xpath expressions are much more fine-grained. See the output which returns the text-value for example w/o any further tags inside:

array(8) {
  [0]=>
  string(16) "Text text text:3"
  [1]=>
  string(14) "Text text text"
  [2]=>
  string(1) "1"
  [3]=>
  string(1) "0"
  [4]=>
  string(1) "2"
  [5]=>
  string(4) "2.90"
  [6]=>
  string(4) "3.20"
  [7]=>
  string(4) "1.85"
}

Code:

$html = <<<EOD
<table width="100%" border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" class="rowData">
  <tr align="center" class="fnt-vrdana-mavi" >
            <td style="font-size:11px" colspan=3><b>Text text text</b>:3</td>
        </tr>

        <tr class="header" align="center">
            <td height="18" colspan="3">Text text text</td>

        </tr>
        <tr align="center" class="fnt-vrdana" bgcolor="#eff3f4" height="18">
            <td width="32%" height="17"><b>1</b></td>
            <td width="34%"><b>0</b></td>
            <td width="34%"><b>2</b></td>
        </tr>
        <tr align="center" class="fnt-vrdana-mavi">

            <td height="17">2.90</td>
            <td>3.20</td>
            <td>1.85</td>
        </tr>
</table>
EOD;

// create DomDocument to operate xpath on
$doc = new DomDocument;
$doc->loadHTML($html);

// create DomXPath
$xpath = new DomXPath($doc);

// perform the XPath query
$nodes = $xpath->query('//td');

// process nodes to return their actual value    
$values = array();
foreach($nodes as $node) {
    $values[] = $node->nodeValue;
}
var_dump($values);