Question

Say I have this:

<li class="one"><strong>String here: </strong><span class="one">&nbsp;
                                 <!--googleoff: all--> 
                                 <strong>STRING TO GRAB</strong> 
                                 <!--googleon: all--> 
                                 </span></li> 

How can I grab the STRING TO GRAB efficiently with RegEx? Keep in mind that this isn’t the only text on the page, so /<strong>(.*)<\/strong>/ wouldn’t work.

Thanks

Answer 1

There are two ways.

Dom classes: use the dom classes of PHP if the html is sort of a decent kind.

See:
– http://www.php.net/manual/en/domxpath.query.php
– http://www.php.net/manual/en/domdocument.loadhtml.php

Regex
If it’s not really valid html or dom loading does not work, perhaps regex is a good solution.

I’m assuming that the <!–googleoff: all–> is always present, this might work, if not, perhaps you can supply some more comments on the specificity of the string:

$string = "yourhtmlstring";
$matches = array();
preg_match('/<!--googleoff: all-->\s+?<strong>(.+)<\/strong>\s+?<!--googleon: all-->/', $string, $matches)
var_dump($matches);

Final tip
To test the regex further: http://tinyurl.com/6gy6584