Regex Question

pianoparadise

I am trying to get the text in between the <ul> and <ul> tags to match. In the example in my code, it should match <li>AAAAA. But it is not working. How can I fix this?


<?php
$data='
<ul>
<li>AAAAAA
<ul>
<li>BBBBB</li>
</ul>
</li>
</ul>';

 $regex = '/\<ul\>(.*)\<ul\>/i';

preg_match($regex,$data,$match);

 echo $match[1];
  var_dump($match);

?>

yamarc

Regex option "dot support newline" needs to be turned on for this pattern.

$regex = '~(?s)<ul>(.*?)</ul>~';

pianoparadise

Thanks, but where is the mistake in my code? I want to learn why it isn't working.

tekky

I believe you simply need /gi to match across newlines...

NogDog

The "s" modifier will include newlines for the "." character.

pianoparadise

NogDog thanks, it worked beautifully! The only thing I don't conceptually understand is why I need to include newlines or match line break characters in the first place. Could you explain please?

NogDog

pianoparadise;10884688 wrote:
NogDog thanks, it worked beautifully! The only thing I don't conceptually understand is why I need to include newlines or match line break characters in the first place. Could you explain please?

Your sample data has multiple lines, and thus has newline characters (and possibly carriage return characters, too, depending on the editor). The "." character in PCRE regexp's does not include newlines/carriage-returns by default, so the "." will not match a range of text if it includes any of those characters. The "s" modifier causes the "." to include those characters, and thus the "." can then span across multiple lines of text.

pianoparadise

Thank you NogDog, I understand now. I really appreciate your help!