problem with preg_match and terminated html tags

[emrys404]

Okay i'm trying to use regex to find an occurance of "<td>blah</td>" in a ob_get_contents() result. here is what i have so far

$var = "something";

// i have tried this:
if(preg_match("#<td>$var</td>#i", $retrievedhtml))
echo "yay!";

// and this
if(preg_match("/<td>$var<\/td>/i", $retrievedhtml))
echo "yay!";

However both seem to err on the closed html tag. ie it finds "$var", "<td>" and "<td>$var" just fine, but not "<td>$var</td>". Aslo it seems to find "</td>" fine but not "$var</td>".. hmm leads me to think it has a string terminator on it or something...

Any ideas what i'm doing wrong?
Thanks in advance
-emrys

[Installer]

Here's something you might use until you get the regular expression figured out:

function find_tagged_str($html, $str, $tag_1 = '<td>', $tag_2 = '</td>')
{
    $str_len = strlen($str);
    $len_1 = strlen($tag_1);
    $len_2 = strlen($tag_2);
    $offset = 0;
    while (($pos = strpos($html, $str, $offset)) !== false) {
        if ((substr($html, $pos - $len_1, $len_1) == $tag_1) &&
             (substr($html, $pos + $str_len, $len_2) == $tag_2)) {
            return $pos;
        }
        $offset = $pos + $str_len;
    }
    return false;
}

[rehfeld]

take a look at preg_quote()

it should solve your problem. run it on $var before you insert $var into your regex pattern