I am using curl to get a large string on text and basically 3 things could happen the string could contain
a div with a unique name inside it for example "class=\"asl bwd asd\">{Valid user}\u003C\/div>"
"The email you entered does not exist"
a div with a unique name inside it for example "class=\"asl bwd
asd\">{UNIQUE STRING}\u003C\/div>"
could someone help me write 3 separate preg matches so I can then do something if one of the three strings are found. The string will never have more than one of the three strings.
Do not try to parse XML or HTML with Regular Expressions. Neither is fully expressible using RegEx.
Use the XML parser functions of PHP instead.
Or something like PHPQuery (I just found that one, I like the idea)
Related
I have the following string inside the source of some website:
user_count: <b>5.122.512</b>
Is this possible to get the number out of this string, even if the tags around this number were different? I mean, "user_count:" part won't change, but the tags can be changed, to strong for example. Or the tags could be doubled, or whatever.
How can I do that?
You can use
user_count:\s*<.*?>(.*?)<.*?>
See DEMO
I'd imagine you have to use JS to extract the content between the tags <b>5.122.512<b> from the DOM.
If you can assign an ID to this you can probably use document.getElementById('NAME_OF_YOUR_ID').innerHTML; to extract the number between it. If you need to process this inside a PHP script, you would probably need to POST this back to the server.
There are a couple of ways to get the number out of the string. One would be just to strip the tags and run a regular expression.
$s = "user_count: <b>5.122.512</b>"
preg_match_all("#user_count: (.+)#", strip_tags($s), $matches);
print_r($matches)
$matches[1] should match the number.
I'm making a function call to a library that is returning a malformed json array. I can work around this if I can get a preg written to extract the part that I want.
The array is a jumbled mess, but buried deep inside it is a string that looks like this:
token=??????,
I need to write a preg to grab the characters represented by the question marks. I wrote this, but it's not getting the part of the text that I want:
$token = preg_match('#^(?:token=)?([^,]+)#i', $badJson, $matches);
Can anyone help me? Thanks.
You can try:
/token=([^,]+)/i
and the use the first sub-match to extract the token. Being more specific is usually a good idea with regex (eg. does the token have a set length? does it only contain hex characters? etc.)
Site note: https://leaverou.github.io/regexplained/ is a great site for testing regular expressions.
Ok, so here's my issue:
I have a link, say: http://www.blablabla.com/watch?v=1lyu1KKwC74&feature=list_other&playnext=1&list=AL94UKMTqg-9CfMhPFKXPXcvJ_j65v7UuV
And the link is between two tags say like this:
<br>http://www.blablabla.com/watch?v=1lyu1KKwC74&feature=list_other&playnext=1&list=AL94UKMTqg-9CfMhPFKXPXcvJ_j65v7UuV<br></p>
Using this regex with preg_replace:
'#(^|[^\/]|[^>])('.addcslashes($link,'.?+').')([^\w\/]|[^<]$)#i'
As such:
preg_replace('#(^|[^\/]|[^>])('.addcslashes($link,'.?+').')([^\w\/]|[^<]$)#i', "***",$strText);
The resulted string is :
<br***p>
Which is wrong!!
It should have been
<br>***<br></p>
How can I get the desired result? I have blasted my head out trying to solve this one out.
I would like to mention that str_replace replaces even the link within another valid link, so it's not a good method, I need an exact match between two boundaries, even if the boundary is text or another HTML tag.
Assuming you don't want to use a DOM parser for some reason, I believe doing what you intended is as simple as the following:
preg_replace('#(^|[^\/]|[^>])('.addcslashes($link,'.?+').')([^\w\/]|[^<]$)#i', "$1***$3",$strText);
This uses $1 and $3 to put back the delimiting text you matched in your regular expression.
As others have pointed out, using a DOM parser is more reliable.
Does this do what you want?
I'm stuck with php preg_match_all function. Maybe someone wil help me with regexp. Let's assume we have some code:
[a]a[/a]
[s]a[/s]
[b]1[/b]
[b]2[/b]
...
...
[b]n[/b]
[e]a[/e]
[b]8[/b]
[b]9[/b]
...
...
[b]n[/b]
I need to match all that inside [b] tags located between [s] and [e] tags. Any ideas?
if your structure is exactly the same as above I would personally avoid regex (not a good idea with these fort of languages) and just check the second char of each line. Once you see an s go into consume mode and for each line until you see an e find the first ] and read in everything between that and the next [
For simplicity use two preg_match calls.
First to retrieve the list you want to inspect /\[s](.+?)\[e]/s.
And then use that result string and match for the contained /\[b](.+?)\[\/b]/s things.
It looks like you are trying to pattern match something that has a treelike structure, essentially like HTML or XML. Any time you find yourself saying "find X located inside matching Y tags" you are going to have this problem.
Trying to do this sort of work with with regular expressions is a Bad Idea.
Here's some info copy/pasted from a different answer of mine for a similar question:
Some references to similar SO posts which will give you an idea of the difficulty you're getting into:
Regex to match all HTML tags except <p> and </p>
Regex to replace all \n in a String, but no those inside [code] [/code] tag
RegEx match open tags except XHTML self-contained tags - bobince says it much more thoroughly than I do (:
The "Right Thing" to do is to parse your input, maintaining state as you go. This can be as simple as scanning your text and keeping a stack of current tags.
Regular expressions alone aren't sufficient to parse XML, and this appears to be a simplified XML language here.
I'm trying to write a regular expression using the PCRE library in PHP.
I need a regex to match only &, > and < chars that exist within string part of any XML node and not the tag declaration themselves.
Input XML:
<pnode>
<cnode>This string contains > and < and & chars.</cnode>
</pnode>
The idea is to to a search and replace these chars and convert them to XML entities equivalents.
If I was to convert the entire XML to entities the XML would look like this:
Entire XML converted to entities
<pnode>
<cnode>This string contains > and < and & chars.</cnode>
</pnode>
I need it to look like this:
Correct XML
<pnode>
<cnode>This string contains > and < and & chars.</cnode>
</pnode>
I have tried to write a regular expression to match these chars using look-ahaead but I don't know enough to get this to work. My attempt (currently only attempting to match > symbols):
/>(?=[^<]*<)/g
Just to make it clear the XML I'm trying to fix comes from a 3rd party and they seem unable to fix it their end hence my attempt to fix it.
In the end I've opted to use the Tidy library in PHP. The code I used is shown below:
// Specify configuration
$config = array(
'input-xml' => true,
'show-warnings' => false,
'numeric-entities' => true,
'output-xml' => true);
$tidy = new tidy();
$tidy->parseFile('feed.xml', $config, 'latin1');
$tidy->cleanRepair()
This works perfectly correcting all the encoding errors and converting invalid characters to XML entities.
Classic example of garbage in, garbage out. The real solution is to fix the broken XML exporter, but obviously that's out of the scope of your problem. Sounds like you might have to manually parse the XML, run htmlentites() on the contents, then put the XML tags back.
I'm reasonably certain it's simply not possible. You need something that keeps track of nesting, and there's no way to get a regular expression to track nesting. Your choices are to fix the text first (when you probably can use an RE) or use something that's at least vaguely like an XML parser, specifically to the extent of keeping track of how the tags are nested.
There's a reason XML demands that these characters be escaped though -- without that, you can only guess about whether something is really a tag or not. For example, given something like:
<tag>Text containing < and > characters</tag>
you and I can probably guess that the result should be: ...containing < and >... but I'm pretty sure the XML specification allows the extra whitespace, so officially "< and >" should be treated as a tag. You could, I suppose, assume that anything that looks like an un-matched tag really isn't intended to be a tag, but that's going to take some work too.
Would it be possible to intercept the text before it tries to become part of your XML? A few ounces of prevention might be worth pounds of cure.
This should do it for ampersands:
/(\s+)(&)(\s+)/gim
This means you're only looking for those characters when they have whitespace characters on both sides.
Just make sure the replacement expression is "$1$2amp;$3";
The others would go like this, with their replacement expressions on the right
/(\s+)(>)(\s+)/gim "$1>$2"
/(\s+)(<)(\s+)/gim "$1<$2"
As stated by others, regular expressions don't do well with hierarchical data. Besides, if the data is improperly formatted, you can't guarantee that you'll get it right. Consider:
<xml>
<tag>Something<br/>Something Else</tag>
</xml>
Is that <br/> supposed to read <br/>? There's no way to know because it's validly formatted XML.
If you have arbitrary data that you wish to include in your XML tree, consider using a <![CDATA[ ... ]]> block instead. It's treated the same as a text node, and the only thing you don't have to escape is the character sequence ]]>.
What you have there is not, of course, XML. In XML, the characters '<' and '&' may not occur (unescaped) inside text: only inside a comment, CDATA section, or processing instruction. Actually, '>' can occur in text, except as part of the string ']]>'. In well-formed XML, literal '<' and '&' characters signal the start of markup: '<' signals the start of a start tag, end tag, or empty element tag, and '&' signals the start of an entity reference. In both these cases, the next character may NOT be whitespace. So using an RE like Robusto's suggestion would find all such occurrences. You might also need to catch corner cases like '<<', '<\', or '&<'. In this case you don't need to try to parse your input, an RE will work fine.
If the source contains strings like '<something ' where 'something' matches the production for a Name:
Name ::= NameStartChar (NameChar)*
Then you have more of a problem. You are going to have to (try to) parse your input as if it were real XML, and detect the error cases of malformed Names, non-matching start & end tags, malformed attributes, and undefined entity references (to name a few). Unfortunately the error condition isn't guaranteed to happen at the location of the error.
Your best bet may be to use an RE to catch 90% of the error and fix the rest manually. You need to look for a '<' or '&' followed by anything other than a NameStartChar