Regex to match content of HTML body in PHP

Question

I need a regex in php for matching contents between tags of an element, e.g. <body> and </body> with the perl compatible preg_match.

So far I tried with:

// $content is a string with html content

preg_match("/<body(.|\r\n)*\/body>/", $content, $matches);

print_r($matches);

…but the printout is an empty array.

Solution

You simply have to add the s modifier to have the dot match all characters, including new lines :

preg_match("/<body.*\/body>/s", $content, $matches);

OTHER TIPS

perl regexp match by default one line

you have to specify that you want to do a multi line search by adding a s or a m after the last /

ex:

$> perl -e 'print $1 if "bla\nbla\n<body>\nfirst line\n second line\n</body>\nbla" =~ /^.*<body>(.*)<\/body>.*$/s'

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