Matching wildcard without adding to the array with preg_match_all - php

Question

I'm trying to capture the table text from an element that looks like this:
<span id="ctl00_MainContent_ListView2_ctrl2_ctl01_Label17" class="vehicledetailTable" style="display:inline-block;width:475px;">OWNED</span><br />
My preg_match_all looks like:
preg_match_all('~475px;">(.*?)</span><br />~', $ret, $vehicle);
The problem is there are other tables on the page that also match but have data not relevant to my query. The data that I want are all in "ListView2," but the "ct101_Label17" varies - Label18, Label19, Label20, etc.
Since I'm not interested in capturing the label, is there a method to match the subject string without capturing the match? Something along the lines of:
<span id="ctl00_MainContent_ListView2_ctrl2_ctl01_[**WILDCARD HERE**]" class="vehicledetailTable" style="display:inline-block;width:475px;">OWNED</span><br />
Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

Here is a very poor solution that you are currently considering:
<span\b[^<>]*\bid="ctl00_MainContent_ListView2_ctrl2_ctl01_[^"]*"[^<>]*475px;">(.*?)</span><br\s*/>
See demo
It makes sure we found a <span> tag and there is id attribute starting with ctl00_MainContent_ListView2_ctrl2_ctl01_, and there is some attribute (and you know it is style) ending with 475px;, and then we just capture anything up to the closing </span> tag.
You can get this with DOM and XPath, which is a much safer solution that uses the same logic as above:
$html = "<span id=\"ctl00_MainContent_ListView2_ctrl2_ctl01_Label17\" class=\"vehicledetailTable\" style=\"display:inline-block;width:475px;\">OWNED</span><br />";
$dom = new DomDocument();
$dom->loadHTML($html);
$xpath = new DOMXPath($dom);
$spans = $xpath->query("//span[starts-with(#id,'ctl00_MainContent_ListView2_ctrl2_ctl01_') and #class='vehicledetailTable' and contains(#style,'475px;')]");
$data = array();
foreach ($spans as $span) {
array_push($data, $span->textContent);
}
print_r($data);
Output: [0] => OWNED
Note that the XPath expression contains 3 conditions, feel free to modify any:
//span - get all span tags that
starts-with(#id,'ctl00_MainContent_ListView2_ctrl2_ctl01_') - have an attribute id with value starting with ctl00_MainContent_ListView2_ctrl2_ctl01_
#class='vehicledetailTable' - and have class attribute with value equal to vehicledetailTable
contains(#style,'475px;') - and have a style attribute whose value contains 475px;.
Conditions are enclosed into [...] and are joined with or or and. They can also be grouped with round brackets. You can also use not(...) to invert the condition. XPath is very helpful in such situations.