[PHP] Regex driving me crazy

[Pieman]

So I want to create a regex which will look up a specific tag in a source code and the only thing you know of said tag is that it has a title (Which you know)

let me give an example, you have these three tags:

<h1 title=\"pie.subject\"></h1>
<h2 title=\"pie.author\">asdasdasd</h2>
<div title=\"pie.text(text)\">
</div>

Now what regex should I use that it returns "<h2 title=\"pie.author\">asdasdasd</h2>"?

I've been busting my balls on this but I just can't seem to figure it out.

Any suggestions?

 

[Daevius]

I don't get it. What do you want to transform into what?

(it can be quite tricky to get regex working when the to-be-matched string has backslashes...is that what you mean?)

 

[Pieman]

OH wait, I should have mentioned I'm working with preg_match, basically what I want is this:

$str= "<h1 title=\"pie.subject\"></h1>
<h2 title=\"pie.author\">asdasdasd</h2>
<div title=\"pie.text(text)\">
</div>"

preg_match("/regex/", $str, $var)

Where $var[x] contains "<h2 title=\"pie.author\">asdasdasd</h2>"

 

[Daevius]

Wait...do you want to make a regex that will get rid of empty tags?

 

[Pieman]

Nope, just match tags which have a certain title, "pie.author" in this case.

 

[King Izu]

Try something like...

<[\w\s]+title="pie.author"[\w\s"=]*>[\w\s]*</\w>

That probably won't work, but you get the idea.

 

[Vineyard]

I'd suggest duplicating the original HTML source string and looping through it with eregi and deleting the match so it doesn't get looped again.

$tagString = $my_old_string;
$resultTagArray = array();
while(eregi('<[a-zA-Z ]+ title\=\"([a-zA-Z0-9._)"[a-zA-Z ]+ >', $tagString, $regexMatch) {
   #remove the tag from the string list
   $tagString = str_replace('', $regexMatch[0], $tagString);
   #add the complete match to the array
   array_push($resultTagArray, $regexMatch[0]);
}
#=> array([0] => '<div title="super_title">')

 

[Pieman]

Hmm, I currently have the following regex

preg_match("/\<.*title\=\\\"pie.author\\\".*\>[\w\s]*\<\/w\>/is", $content, $test);

But it still doesn't work.

 

[Daevius]

Yeah, at least the ending tag is incorrect:

\<\/w\>

Should be:

\<\/.*\>

 

[Pieman]

It now outputs the entire contents of $str. Which I don't get as it should only match tags which have "pie.author" as title.

 

[Pieman]

After some help from the kind folks over at phpfreakz, I finally solved it:

$spattern = sprintf('#<([a-z0-9]+)[^>]title=\"%s\"[^<]*>.*</\\1>#','pie.author');
                                                        
preg_match($spattern, $str, $aMatch);