PHP Regular expressions problem [duplicate] - php

Question

This question already has answers here:
Parse HTML with PHP's HTML DOMDocument
(2 answers)
PHP Regular expressions class/id
(1 answer)
Closed 8 years ago.
I'm using regex to pull info from a html table.
But I'm messing up some how, and have no idea why.
PHP CODE:
$printable = file_get_contents('./testplaylist.php', true);
if(preg_match_all('/<TR[^>]*>(.*?)<\/TR>/si', $printable, $matches, PREG_SET_ORDER)); {
foreach($matches as $match) {
$data = "$match[1]";
echo("$data <br />");
}
}
HTML DATA:
<TR class=" light ">
Stuff in here
</TR>
Any help would be appreciated,
Thanks!

Answer 1

Try this one instead
http://sandbox.phpcode.eu/g/bba70.php
if(preg_match_all('/<TR[^>]*>(.*?)<\/TR>/msU', $printable, $matches)) {
foreach($matches[1] as $match) {
echo("$match <br />");
}
}

Answer 2

I know what your first problem is. regex! I kid! but have you checked out PHP DOM?
http://www.php.net/manual/en/domdocument.loadhtmlfile.php
It would probably work in your case just fine. It would be 10x easier too.
Some people, when confronted with a problem, think “I know, I'll use
regular expressions.” Now they have two problems. -Jamie Zawinski

Answer 3

Works fine here. It should work unless you have nested tables.
The problem must be in your data source. Do some tracing with var_dump.

Answer 4

Use PHP's document object model to be safe when parsing HTML. Except for very simple regexes, HTML parsing rapidly gets out of control when you DIY. There's a bit of overhead to set it up, but once you get going it's straightforward.
See DOM for instructions on how to use it.
If you stick to the regex technique, at the least, you may need to escape all '<' and '>'s eg.
/\<TR[^>]*\>(.*?)\<\/TR\>/si