Regular expression - PHP Preg Match - php

Question

I am learning to use Regular expressions and would like to grab some data from a table:
The file looks like this:
$subject =
<tbody>
<tr>
<td>1</td>
<td>2</td>
<td>3</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>4</td>
<td>5</td>
<td>6</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
Currently I am doing the following:
$pattern = "/<tr>.*?<td><\/td>.*?<td>(.*?)<\/td>.../s";
preg_match(
$pattern,
$subject,
$result);
This will output an array:
$result = [
0 => "tbody>...",
1 => 1,
2 => 2,
3 => 3,
4 => 4 ... n
]
This seems inefficient so I am attempting to grab a repeated pattern like so:
$pattern = "/<td>([0-9]{1,2})<\/td>/s";
This however only grabs the first number: 1
What would be the best way to go about this?

Answer 1

You should use preg_match_all instead of preg_match to perform the search on the entire var
http://php.net/manual/en/function.preg-match-all.php
if (preg_match_all( $pattern, $subject, $matches)) {
var_dump($matches);
}

Answer 2

Here's a way to accomplish this using a parser:
$subject = '
<tbody>
<tr>
<td>1</td>
<td>2</td>
<td>3</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>4</td>
<td>5</td>
<td>6</td>
</tr>
</tbody>';
$html = new DOMDocument();
$html->loadHTML($subject);
$tds = $html->getElementsByTagName('td');
foreach($tds as $td){
echo $td->nodeValue . "\n";
if(is_numeric($td->nodeValue)) {
echo "it's a number \n";
}
}
Output:
1
it's a number
2
it's a number
3
it's a number
4
it's a number
5
it's a number
6
it's a number

Answer 3

To get all the values and not stopping after the first match you need to use the g flag.
In php this is implemented in the preg_match_all function.
Since the data will always be contained in a td you can do the following:
preg_match_all("/<td>(.*)<\/td>", $subject, $matches);
var_dump($matches);
Where the $subject contains you html and you should see an array of all your table data.