how to use multiple preg_match with one foreach loop

Question

I have multiple preg match expressions, and I'm trying to use each to output something different. I know how to use foreach to output one at a time. but how do I echo or set them a variable?

preg_match_all("/\<div class=\"merchant_info\">\s*(\<div.*?\<\/div>\s*)?(.*?)\<\/div\>/is", $res[0], $matches );

   foreach($matches[0] as $titles)
{
    echo "<div class='titles' >".$titles."</div>";
}

preg_match_all("/\<a class=\"thumb\"(.*?)\<\/a\>/is", $res[0], $matches);

   foreach($matches[0] as $thumbs)
{
    echo "<div class='thumbs' >".$thumbs."</div>";
}

I want to be able to echo the titles and thumbs together. or if i can set them as a variable and then output it somewhere else?

Thanks

score 2 · Answer 1 · edited May 23 '17 at 12:06

Should the list of matches correlate, you could simple combine it this way:

preg_match_all("/\<div class=\"merchant_info\">\s*(\<div.*?\<\/div>\s*)?(.*?)\<\/div\>/is", $res[0], $matches );
preg_match_all("/\<a class=\"thumb\"(.*?)\<\/a\>/is", $res[0], $second);

foreach($matches[0] as $i => $titles)
{
    echo "<div class='titles' >".$titles."</div>";
    echo "<div class='thumbs' >".$second[$i]."</div>";
}

Note how the second preg_match_all uses the result variable $second. The $i is the numeric index of the first $matches array, but is used as-is for the $second.

Btw. I'm all for using regular expressions. But seeing the complexity of the match this might be one of the cases where your code might benefit from using a HTML parser instead. phpQuery or QueryPath make it much simpler to extract the contents and ensure that the titles really belong to the thumbnails.

I'll look into the html parser. I couldn't get this one to work. I think the other solution worked better because I now know how to get multiple arrays if I have to do more than 2. — hellomello, Mar 16 '11 at 20:00

score 2 · Accepted Answer · answered Mar 16 '11 at 07:15

Try this,

$title = array();
$thumb = array();

$string = '';

preg_match_all("/\<div class=\"merchant_info\">\s*(\<div.*?\<\/div>\s*)?(.*?)\<\/div\>/is", $res[0], $matches );
foreach($matches[0] as $titles){

    $title[] = "<div class='titles' >".$titles."</div>";

}
preg_match_all("/\<a class=\"thumb\"(.*?)\<\/a\>/is", $res[0], $matches);
foreach($matches[0] as $thumbs){

    $thumb[] = "<div class='thumbs' >".$thumbs."</div>";

}
for($i = 0; $i < count($title); $i++){

    $string .= $title[$i] . $thumb[$i];

}

echo $string;

score 1 · Answer 3 · answered Mar 16 '11 at 09:40

preg_match_all("/\<div class=\"merchant_info\">\s*(\<div.*?\<\/div>\s*)?(.*?)\<\/div\>/is", $res[0], $matches[] );
preg_match_all("/\<a class=\"thumb\"(.*?)\<\/a\>/is", $res[0],  $matches[]);

foreach($matches[0][0] as $i => $titles)
{
    echo "<div class='titles' >".$titles."</div>";
    echo "<div class='thumbs' >". $matches[1][0][$i]."</div>";
}

how to use multiple preg_match with one foreach loop

3 Answers3