hey guys,
a curl function returns a string $widget that contains regular html -> two divs where the first div holds a table with various values inside of <td>'s.
i wonder what's the easiest and best way for me to extract only all the values inside of the <td>'s so i have blank values without the remaining html.
any idea what the pattern for the preg_match should look like?
thank you.
Regex is not a suitable solution. You're better off loading it up in a DOMDocument and parsing it.
You shouldn't use regexps to parse HTML. Use DOM and XPath instead. Here's an example:
$doc = new DOMDocument();
$doc->loadHTML($html);
$xpath = new DOMXPath($doc);
$nodes = $xpath->query('//td');
$result = array();
foreach ($nodes as $node) {
$result[] = $node->nodeValue;
}
// $result holds the values of the tds
You're betting off using a DOM parser for that task:
$html = <<<HTML
<div>
<table>
<tr>
<td>foo</td>
<td>bar</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>hello</td>
<td>world</td>
</tr>
</table>
</div>
<div>
Something irrelevant
</div>
HTML;
$dom = new DOMDocument;
$dom->loadHTML($html);
$xpath = new DOMXPath($dom);
$tds = $xpath->query('//div/table/tr/td');
foreach ($tds as $cell) {
echo "{$cell->textContent}\n";
}
Would output:
foo
bar
hello
world
Only if you have very limited, well-defined HTML can you expect to parse it with regular expressions. The highest ranked SO answer of all time addresses this issue.
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