How can assign preg_match_all variable to a vaiable - php

Question

Forgive me as I am a newbie programmer. How can I assign the resulting $matches (preg_match) value, with the first character stripped, to another variable ($funded) in php? You can see what I have below:
<?php
$content = file_get_contents("https://join.app.net");
//echo $content;
preg_match_all ("/<div class=\"stat-number\">([^`]*?)<\/div>/", $content, $matches);
//testing the array $matches
//echo sprintf('<pre>%s</pre>', print_r($matches, true));
$funded = $matches[0][1];
echo substr($funded, 1);
?>

Answer 1

Don't parse HTML with RegEx.
The best way is to use PHP DOM:
<?php
$handle = curl_init('https://join.app.net');
curl_setopt($handle, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER, false);
curl_setopt($handle, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
$raw = curl_exec($handle);
curl_close($handle);
$doc = new DOMDocument();
$doc->loadHTML($raw);
$elems = $doc->getElementsByTagName('div');
foreach($elems as $item) {
if($item->getAttribute('class') == 'stat-number')
if(strpos($item->textContent, '$') !== false) $funded = $item->textContent;
}
// Remove $ sign and ,
$funded = preg_replace('/[^0-9]/', '', $funded);
echo $funded;
?>
This returned 380950 at the time of posting.

Answer 2

I am not 100% sure but it seems like you are trying to get the dollar amount that the funding is currently ?
And the character is a dollar sign that you want to strip out ?
If that is the case why not just add the dollar sign to the regex outside the group so it isn't captured.
/<div class=\"stat-number\">\$([^`]*?)<\/div>/
Because $ means end of line in regex you must first escape it with a slash.