Having a problem matching a html element using Preg_Match

Question

I am trying to match a html element but I don't think its matching since $titles is empty - can anyone correct me?

My preg_match:

   preg_match_all("~<td align=\"left\" width=\"50%\">[^<]*. <b><a href=\"(.*?)\">[^<]*</a>~i", $main, $titles);

Example HTML to match:

//<td align="left" width="50%">1. <b><a title="Wat" href="http://www.exmple.com/q.html">Wat</a></b><br></td>

Am I missing something?

Thanks all for any help

Answer 1

There's nothing to match title="Wat" in the <a> tag.

I'd suggest not using a regex to parse it though. I'm not too familiar with PHP but I'm sure it already has something that will do most of the work for you.

Answer 2

As i said in my comment regex is rarely if ever the proper tool to use when trying to parse html. Im foing to use an example of Zend_Dom_Query, one of th ecomponetns in Zend Framework simply because i havent seen it recommended on one of these questions yet. So...

$dom = new Zend_Dom_Query($htmlHaystack);
$anchors = $dom->query('//td/a[@title]'); // xpath here
if(count($anchors) > 0)
{
  $titles = array();
  foreach($anchors as $element)
  {
     $titles[] = $element->getAttribute('title');
  }
}
else
{
  $title = null;
}

Answer 3

$string='<td align="left" width="50%">1. <b><a title="Wat" href="http://www.exmple.com/q.html">Wat</a></b><br></td>';
$s = explode("</a>",$string);
foreach($s as $k){
   if (strpos($k,"href")!==FALSE){
        echo preg_replace('/.*href="|">.*/ms',"",$k);
   }
}