PCRE stumped: How to 'match' a specific nested HTML tag

mxpt3c

I've been looking around the manuals on PCRE syntax and I just can't make this pattern match work:

you can say for example

"|<tag>(.*)</tag>|Ui"

when using preg_match_all, but what I would like to do is match the contents of <tag>'s innermost nested tag

(I want to extract 'blah' with any varying nesting depth, and all I know is <tag> is outermost).

Can someone help with this?

drew010

here's something that worked in my test.

$html = "this is some text followed by some nested tags <tag><tag2><tag3>blah</tag3></tag2></tag> and we know that tag is the outer-most (phew)";

preg_match_all("/<tag>(<[^>]+>)*(.*?)(<[^>]+>)*<\/tag>/si", $html, $matches);

$matches[2][$x] will contain the "blah" text

mxpt3c

Thanks so much for writing back! I think I'm beginning to get this but yeah, it's been hard finding a page that actually explains the different uses of these characters in example...