preg_match_all skippes one nested tag - preg-match

Question

if you look at this tag:
$text = '<div class="inner">
<div class="left">
<h4>text </h4>
<p>Abdijstreet 42b<br>2000 city </p>
</div>
<div class="right">
<span class="red">10:00 - 14:00</span>
</div>
</div>'
I use this to preg_match:
preg_match_all("'<div class=\"inner\">(.*?)</div>'si", $text, $match); // de ul tags
$match[1] = array_splice($match[0], 0);
foreach($match[1] as $val) // hele pagina
{
echo $val;
}
Well i tried many things, but i only get whats between and never what i need for , what am i doing wrong?

Answer 1

Are you trying to get everything between the beginning and ending div tags? If so, then you're really close. All you'd need to do is just remove the question mark ? from your expression. The question mark tells the script to stop matching once it finds the next item in the REGEX. In this case, the next item is a closing div tag. So once it finds it, it stops. If you leave it out, it will keep matching until it hits the last div tag it can find.
$text = '<div class="inner">
<div class="left">
<h4>text </h4>
<p>Abdijstreet 42b<br>2000 city </p>
</div>
<div class="right">
<span class="red">10:00 - 14:00</span>
</div>
</div>';
preg_match_all("'<div class=\"inner\">(.*)</div>'si", $text, $match);
print "<pre><font color=red>"; print_r($match); print "</font></pre>";
If you're trying to pull out each item in a div, then you'd probably want to consider using DOM instead of REGEX to tackle this problem. But since you used the preg-match tag, then here it is in REGEX:
preg_match_all('~<div class="(?!inner).*?>\K(.*?)(?=</div>)~ims', $text, $matches);
print "<PRE><FONT COLOR=BLUE>"; print_r($matches[1]); print "</FONT></PRE>";
That gives you this:
Array
(
[0] =>
<h4>text </h4>
<p>Abdijstreet 42b<br>2000 city </p>
[1] =>
<span class="red">10:00 - 14:00</span>
)
Explanation of the REGEX:
<div class=" (?!inner) .*? > \K (.*?) (?=</div>)
^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^
1 2 3 4 5 6 7
<div class=" Look for a literal opening div tag <div, followed by a space, followed by the word class, followed by an equal sign, followed by a quotation mark.
(?!inner) This is a negative lookahead (?!) that makes sure the word inner is not coming up next.
.*? Matches any one character ., zero or more times *, all the way up until it hits the next item in our regular expression ?. In this case, it will stop once it finds a closing HTML bracket.
> Find a closing HTML bracket.
\K This tells the expression to forget everything it has matched so far and start matching again from here. This basically makes sure that the first part of the expression is there, but does not store it for us to work with.
(.*?) Same as number 3, except we use parenthesis () around it so we can capture it and do something with it later.
(?=</div>) This is a positive lookahead (?=) that makes sure the closing div tag </div> is coming up at the end of the expression, but does not capture it.
Here is a working demo of the code above