How to grab the contents of HTML tags?

Question

Hey so what I want to do is snag the content for the first paragraph. The string $blog_post contains a lot of paragraphs in the following format:

<p>Paragraph 1</p><p>Paragraph 2</p><p>Paragraph 3</p>

The problem I'm running into is that I am writing a regex to grab everything between the first <p> tag and the first closing </p> tag. However, it is grabbing the first <p> tag and the last closing </p> tag which results in me grabbing everything.

Here is my current code:

if (preg_match("/[\\s]*<p>[\\s]*(?<firstparagraph>[\\s\\S]+)[\\s]*<\\/p>[\\s\\S]*/",$blog_post,$blog_paragraph))
   echo "<p>" . $blog_paragraph["firstparagraph"] . "</p>";
else
  echo $blog_post;

Answer 1

Well, sysrqb will let you match anything in the first paragraph assuming there's no other html in the paragraph. You might want something more like this

<p>.*?</p>

Placing the ? after your * makes it non-greedy, meaning it will only match as little text as necessary before matching the </p>.

Answer 2

If you use preg_match, use the "U" flag to make it un-greedy.

preg_match("/<p>(.*)<\/p>/U", $blog_post, &$matches);

$matches[1] will then contain the first paragraph.

Answer 3

It would probably be easier and faster to use strpos() to find the position of the first

 <p>

and first

</p>

then use substr() to extract the paragraph.

 $paragraph_start = strpos($blog_post, '<p>');
 $paragraph_end = strpos($blog_post, '</p>', $paragraph_start);
 $paragraph = substr($blog_post, $paragraph_start + strlen('<p>'), $paragraph_end - $paragraph_start - strlen('<p>'));

Edit: Actually the regex in others' answers will be easier and faster... your big complex regex in the question confused me...

Answer 4

Using Regular Expressions for html parsing is never the right solution. You should be using XPATH for this particular case:

$string = <<<XML
<a>
 <b>
  <c>texto</c>
  <c>cosas</c>
 </b>
 <d>
  <c>código</c>
 </d>
</a>
XML;

$xml = new SimpleXMLElement($string);

/* Busca <a><b><c> */
$resultado = $xml->xpath('//p[1]');