Find all HTML table rows in PHP with regexp

Question

Trying to find all HTML <table> rows with this operator, but nothing:

preg_match_all("#<tr[^>]*>.*</tr>#", $content, $matches);

what's wrong?

[The pony he comes...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1732348/regex-match-open-tags-except-xhtml-self-contained-tags/1732454#1732454) — Niet the Dark Absol, Aug 07 '12 at 13:50
[The pony he comes...](http://stackoverflow.com/a/1732454/1338999) DON'T USE REGULAR EXPRESSIONS TO PARSE HTML! — Matt, Aug 07 '12 at 13:50
I do wonder if we should be able to close questions with a canned 'HTML/Regexp' reason — Brian Agnew, Aug 07 '12 at 13:51

score 4 · Answer 1 · answered Aug 07 '12 at 13:52

4

preg_match_all ('#<tr[^>]*>(.*?)</tr>#s')

Added the "s" flag, so that it also matches newlines, a question mark to the match (lazy), and also added parenthesis (to capture the group).

answered Aug 07 '12 at 13:52

DavidS

score 3 · Answer 2 · answered Aug 07 '12 at 13:50

3

I think you'll have a lot more success with a PHP HTML parser.

answered Aug 07 '12 at 13:50

Brian Agnew

score 3 · Accepted Answer · answered Aug 07 '12 at 13:51

3

Any regex will have trouble with nested tables, unless you get into complicated recursive expressions.

Try this instead:

$dom = new DOMDocument();
$dom->loadHTML($content);
$matches = $dom->getElementsByTagName("tr");
$count = $matches->length;

answered Aug 07 '12 at 13:51

And what if I want look into HTML between tags after that? – Dmytro Zarezenko Aug 07 '12 at 14:02
Since `$matches` is a DOMNodeList, each node has a property `childNodes` which is another DOMNodeList of its children. – DavidS Aug 08 '12 at 06:10
@Kolink Well i may case when i have to parse an invalid HTML the DOMDocument is failed to parse. – Ravi Soni Aug 30 '13 at 07:03

3 Answers3