Question

Possible Duplicate:
regex help with getting tag content in PHP

At first, please no comment about parsing html with regex. I know that it is not possible but it should do its job in this case.

I try to get the content of <country lan="x">...</country> tags. There is no special case like <country /> and the PHP DOM Parser fails due to the content of the tags which contains many special chars (MediaWiki text).

So I have some text like

    <country lan="en">


    dsadasd


    {|,'''""" }}|]][][]//\\\\\2r2erfaf<>><<<#<div> --..,;;"!"§$%&/()=?`´´``***+~~~''

    0131ß

    ÄÜÖ#ax
    </country>

My solution at the moment is $pattern = <country lan=\"en\">(.|\t|\r|\n|\s)*<\/country> which seems to match using

preg_match_all($pattern, $content, $matches);
print_r($matches);

but the printed result is just an empty array. How can I extract only the string between the <country lan="x">...</country> tags?

Answer 1

Use this one

preg_match_all('/<country.*?>(.*?)<\/country>/s', $contents,$hits);
print_r($hits);