Regular expression problem

michelledebeer

I would like to extract each part of a page that are enclosed in a -tag, but ONLY if there are no other tags enclosed.

Ex:
some text <-- a match
some text in italic <-- should NOT match

This is what I have so far:

$pattern = "/<b>(.*?)<\/b>/si";

preg_match_all($pattern, "<b>some text <i>in italic </i></b>", $out);

Any thoughts?
// Michelle

Norman_Graham

Hi Michelle

My thought is - does it work? What happens when you run it?

Norm

vallette

Hey Michelle,

Assuming the HTML you're parsing is valid and doesn't contain any non-encoded less-than symbols you could go with a pattern like /([^<]+)<\/b>/

Dave

michelledebeer

Norman Graham wrote:
My thought is - does it work? What happens when you run it?

Works, yes.
Works as I want it to, no. 😉

What I want is a patterns that extracts everything between a and , but ONLY if there are no other tags nested.

// The pattern should find something in this haystack
// since there are <b> and </b> and something in between
$haystack = "<b>some text</b>";

// The pattern should NOT find anything in this haystack
// even though there are <b> and </b>, because there are tags nested
// (in this case the <i> and </i>)
$haystack = "<b>some text <i>in italic </i></b>";

// Is there some way of adding something to the (.*?), like (.*? !(< || >))
$pattern = "/<b>(.*?)<\/b>/si";

preg_match($pattern, $haystack, $out);

EDIT: Dave, just saw your post, I will try that... Thanks!

Any thoughts?

// Michelle

xblue

I thought I posted in reply to this yesterday. Well I may have missed to submit it.

Anyway, my suggestion was almost identical to Dave's.